The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Poirot)
Few crime novels have left such a permanent mark on detective fiction as this one. Christie takes a bold, almost audacious swing here, and it pays off completely. It's an early Hercule Poirot case, but one that already shows the author at her most cunning and self-assured. Roger Ackroyd was a man who knew too much. The woman he loved had poisoned her first husband, a brutal man by all accounts, and Roger had begun to suspect that someone was quietly bleeding her dry through blackmail. Then came the devastating news that she had ended her own life with an overdose of drugs. Tragedy upon tragedy. Yet the evening post had one final, fatal delivery waiting for Roger. A letter. Something that would have changed everything, had he lived long enough to finish reading it. He didn't. By the time anyone found him, he'd been stabbed through the heart. What follows is vintage Christie: a village full of suspects, a web of half-truths and convenient silences, and the fastidious Belgian detective picking his way through it all with characteristic precision. The ending, when it comes, is the sort that stops you cold. Readers have argued about it for decades, and rightly so. This is the book that proved detective fiction could be genuinely, gloriously surprising.
- Author: Agatha Christie
- Publisher: Harper Collins
- Genre: Science Fiction
- ISBN: 978-0007527526
- Pages: 336 pages