I have read enough of Christie's books that their relative quality can be reduced to one variable. They are all filled with vivid, human characters, engaging dialogue, and skillful pacing, so to comment on these elements seems pointless. The one thing that varies from novel to novel is the cleverness, the extent to which she "gets" me, and leaves me at the end admiring how skillfully she misled and surprised me.
By that measure, this is a middling specimen. She fooled me, in a manner of speaking, in that she dropped some nice red herrings. In particular, i felt very clever for sussing out early the possibility that the culprit was not, as the characters assumed, a woman, and was in fact the gay-coded Mr. Pye. I was so invested in this thread that I considered researching whether Christie was using "queer" more than she usually does to drop a cute hint. She "got me", of course, as it became clear that this was a red herring. Similarly, she suckered me into wondering about Megan by casually mentioning her dark side in a way that might have been a setup. In both cases, she revealed herself a bit too early by mentioning the relevant clues perhaps once too often.
Nonetheless, these little traps pale in comparison to certain others. The perpetrator turns out in the end to be rather run of the mill, and not at all surprising. They are not, to cite a few examples, the innocent child, the narrator himself, the victim, the investigator, to mention a few of my favorite examples. The result here is a perfectly skillful, competent, and enjoyable mystery by general standards, but of a class below her greatest tricks.
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