The New Hercule Poirot Mystery by Sophie Hannah, Wm Morrow/HarperCollins, September 2014.
* A copy was provided by the the publisher and Edelweiss for an honest review.
Sophie Hannah's new novel, THE MONOGRAM MURDERS, follows the famous Belgium detective, Hercule Poirot, as he tries to uncover the mystery surrounding the death of three guests at a London hotel and the possible death of a young woman he encounters in a coffeehouse. Through various twists and turns, and several red herrings, Poirot sifts through the clues and gleans the truth about what happened.
The author fully captures Poirot's OCD habits and his mode of speech. I can picture David Suchet's Poirot smiling condescendingly at some fool, wincing at a scattered placesetting or a maid dropping his hat, and spelling out the truth of what happened to the gathered group of suspects.
However, the tone of the story seems more current than the original Poirot mysteries by Agatha Christie. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless the reader is a devoted Christie fan. The story is told from a different point of view than the original stories were. The new narrator, Scotland Yard's Edward Catchpool, is thirty-two and introduces himself as a policeman friend of Poirot's. They meet when Poirot stays in the same London boardinghouse as Catchpool, about six weeks before the events in the book. Catchpool is a touch insecure and feels everyone will soon catch on that he's not the best policeman out there. He is an acceptable narrator, though.
I prefer to base this review on the book itself and not on how it does or does not read like Agatha Christie wrote it. With that in mind, I think this is a fairly entertaining novel that has enough clues and suspects to make it an enjoyable story for people who love mysteries. With the good balance of dialogue and description, the interesting and unusual mystery, and a story that flows along nicely, this novel could bring in some new readers of Agatha Christie's stories.