Roger Ackroyd receives a last letter from the woman he loves, written just before she took her life and disclosing a fatal piece of information…but before finishing the letter, he himself is stabbed!

This was exactly what I want and expect from an Agatha Christie murder mystery - a puzzle with multiple suspects, plenty of relevant yet misleading clues and a genuinely unexpected but entirely believable revelation at the end. Though I worked out one or two aspects of the denouement, I absolutely did not figure out who the murderer was, and upon finishing the book, I immediately wanted to reread it to search out all the missed clues masterfully hidden in plain sight (I did not in the end, because time, but I was sorely tempted). One of the things I love the most about Christie’s novels is that the clues are all there, you just have to use your “little grey cells” as Poirot constantly reminds us, and this is a shining example of Christie’s clever wording of crucial information. Hastings is off gallivanting in Argentina for this one, so he does not feature, but I did enjoy Poirot’s references to his boundless enthusiasm and oft-misplaced ideas - it provides a layer of amusement for anyone who has read the previous Poirots, though it is not at all necessary to have done so. A cleverly-written murder mystery, epitomising Christie’s flair for masterful presentation of clues - an excellent example of why she is often considered the queen of the genre.