booksare42's reviews
593 reviews

 Thank you to The Write Reads for organizing this blog tour and to the publisher, Silver Thistle Press, for providing me with a copy of this novella. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Haunting Scent of Poppies is a haunting novella that takes place in the days leading up to the first Christmas after World War One. This novella follows Charlie, a petty criminal on the run, whose most recent theft might be more than it seems.

In this novella, Charlie steals a rare book that should set him up for life. Unfortunately for Charlie, this book is haunting him and it causes him to experience the horrors of war that it’s previous owner experienced. Suddenly he’s surrounded by the stench of mustard gas and the haunting scent of poppies is following him everywhere he goes.

The Haunting Scent of Poppies does an excellent job weaving the flashbacks of the horrors of trenches with the post-war setting that the story takes place in. The reader is seamlessly transported from a quiet English town to the front lines and back again, in a way that makes them feel unsettled and looking over their shoulder. The novella also left me wondering what was real and what was just a hallucination, which added another haunting layer to the story.

While I didn’t like Charlie, I did appreciate how complex of a character he was. It’s difficult to figure out who Charlie is because he’s constantly changing his story to blend in and take advantage of the person he’s talking to. His sins are catching up with him and I was on the edge of my seat wondering if he’d be able to get away from them.

Overall, The Haunting Scent of Poppies is a very haunting and mysterious read. It’s the perfect story to reach for if you’re looking for something spooky to read on a long winter night. 

Five Little Pigs is the January pick for Read Christie 2025. The January prompt is artist and the 2025 theme is Characters and Careers. Five Little Pigs is also a reread for me, but I’m glad I reread it because I enjoyed it more the second time around.

The set up of Five Little Pigs is what makes this Poirot mystery standout. The crime that Poirot has been hired to investigate happened sixteen years ago. He talks to the five people who were present and uses his little grey cells to see if he can untangle the truth. Poirot finds that these people fit perfectly into the five little pigs nursery rhyme, which comes up a lot in the story.

I liked how each of the people who were interviewed remembered things just a little bit differently. They all had different moments that stood out to them, different ways of interpreting what they saw, and different biases. I also liked that all five characters had something that they were hiding and how Poirot called them out on it.

Five Little Pigs has a lot of Poirot in it, which is something I love. Poirot is one of my favourite fictional characters and he was fun in this book. I loved how he got the different people to open up to him about what happened when Mr. Crale died.

There were some moments in Five Little Pigs that were a bit repetitive since Poirot was asking five people to recount the same stretch of time. I didn’t mind this though because I liked seeing the different perspectives.

Overall, Five Little Pigs is a very enjoyable mystery. It was clever and reminded me how much I love Poirot. I enjoyed trying to piece the mystery together and trying to figure out the truth.