Hallowe'en Party

Agatha Christie

10/31/2002

Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, the mystery writer, contacts Hercules Poirot to come to an English village. She was visiting with a friend and helped with a older children's Hallowe'en party. At the end of the party one of the girls was discovered drowned in the apple bobbing tub. This girl had been boasting earlier in the day of a murder she had witnessed. She had refused to say any more at the time. Now she wouldn't say anything again.

Poirot comes to Woodleigh Common. He starts investigating unusual deaths that had occured in the area in the past few years. There was the rich elderly woman who had been ill but still died more quickly than anticipated. Her estate went to her nephew's wife. The nephew had died a while earlier in a car accident. There was the young man who was knifed after leaving a bar. He had been seeing several women at once, and the unsolved murder was attributed to jealousy. For such a quiet small village, there are other mysteries as well. There is the beautiful garden built in the quarry. There is a hidden wishing well in it. There is the elderly woman's au pair who forged a will in her own favor, then disappeared after the forgery was discovered. Poirot has to discover which of these deaths was a murder the young girl had witnessed.

This was one of Dame Christie's later novels. I kept getting thrown whenever computers, rock stars, colorful clothing, and other descriptions of the 1960's were used. Poirot has aged properly for the time, and now readily admits his jet black hair comes from a bottle. Although he is older, he isn't senile. He still is sharp and can use his brain to put together the probable solution. Now he has to prove it before someone else dies.

I found this to be slow. I never was pulled in, and figured out a good portion of the mystery by the half way point of the book. Admittedly, there was a twist I didn't guess. It's difficult to dislike the arrogant Poirot, though. (By the way, I finished and reviewed this book on the appropriate day.)

You can find more about this book at .

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mysery of the Blue Train
Peril at End House
Thirteen at Dinner
Murder on the Orient Express
The A.B.C. Murders
Death in the Air
Murder in Three Acts
Cards on the Table
Murder in Mesopotamia
Death on the Nile
Poirot Loses a Client
Dean Man's Mirror
Appointment With Death
A Holiday for Murder
Sad Cypress
An Overdose of Death
Evil Under the Sun
Murder in Retrospect
Murder After Hours
The Labours of Hercules
There is a Tide
The Underdog and Other Stories
Mrs. McGinty's Dead
Funerals Are Fatal
Hickory, Dickory, Death
Dead Man's Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
Double Sin and Other Stories
The Clocks
Third Girl
Halloween Party
Elephants Can Remember
Hercule Poirot's Early Cases
Curtain