Rating: 7.4/10.
[WARNING: SPOILERS!]
Second book I read by Agatha Christie, it was okay but I liked the first one better (And Then There Were None). In this mystery, detective Hercule Poirot is on a train in Eastern Europe when one of the passengers is murdered, and also the train gets stuck in a snowbank so nobody can enter or leave, so we know for sure that the culprit is one of the passengers on the train. The victim turns out to be responsible for a kidnapping. The details are complicated but eventually Poirot figures it out, in a massive plot twist, it is revealed that actually all of the passengers (except for himself) are involved in the crime, due to having some connection to the kidnapper.
The story seems too fantastical to me, too perfect to have occurred in real life. There are just way too many parts and unknown factors for it to be elaborately planned and rehearsed. Some of the clues were kind of interesting: the observation that the phrase “Ce n’est rien, je me suis trompe” is almost certainly said by a native French speaker, and the letter ‘H’ that doubles as ‘N’ in Cyrillic. I wonder if Christie had any interest in linguistics.
