A review by meimi
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

adventurous challenging emotional mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Things I liked about this book:

• Plenty of possible culprits and plausible motives, the actual process of trying to solve it was very fun for me
• Lots of tangled plot points affecting the main mystery
• Relationships between all the characters were a key part of the story

Things I’m conflicted about:

• I found the ending unsatisfying (the actual solution is fine, but I didn’t like the way it was presented, please see spoiler section below for more details)
• The first half(?) was EXTREMELY slow and difficult to get into (Once the crime itself took place, this stopped being a major issue)
• Some plot threads felt pointless or like a waste of time (eg. random characters suddenly getting engaged)

Spoiler

My theory was that Tim committed the crimes on behalf of Joanna, so I was taken in by a rather splendid red herring, well done Christie. There were clues to the actual culprits that I didn’t pick up on, and I can accept that. Nevertheless, I strongly dislike when a mystery is resolved with “obvious suspicious person is the culprit”, because I don’t like investing my time into a puzzle only to find that I put in far too much effort, because I could’ve told you that Jacqueline and Simon were suspicious right away. The reason I abandoned that possibility was because the story told me repeatedly that it was impossible for them to be the culprits, and I accepted that as a ‘rule’ for the mystery instead of something to be interrogated. That’s my mistake, I won’t trust Christie with such things in the future, but it felt like a bit of a slap in the face.