ORIGINAL PUB: 1969
GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
SETTING: England
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: C
FROM PUBLISHER: At a Hallowe’en party, Joyce—a hostile thirteen-year-old—boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no one believes her, she storms off home. But within hours her body is found, still in the house, drowned in an apple-bobbing tub.
That night, Hercule Poirot is called in to find the “evil presence.” But first he must establish whether he is looking for a murderer or a double murderer.…
MY THOUGHTS: Joyce Reynolds has a reputation for being a compulsive liar. I don't like that people naturally assumed she was lying about having witnessed a murder in the past. No one asked her questions about it, they just wrote her off as a liar. Everything everyone said about her was negative and I felt that no one even cared she was murdered. The synopsis describes her as being "hostile" but she's only that way because she's being called a liar.
I felt the ending with Miranda, Joyce's friend, was nonsense. There was also another murder later on that I felt was unnecessary. Two young women were murdered previously, before Joyce, and I'm not sure why that was even mentioned as their murders weren't even investigated during the novel and it's not likely they have anything to do with Joyce's murder anyway, or the other murder in the book.
One thing that bothers me is that it's said that (I think) there was no water anywhere around where Joyce was drowned, leading me to incorrectly believe Joyce was killed elsewhere by some other method other than drowning and her head placed in the tub of water afterward. You don't have to watch true crime television to know that someone being drowned is going to make quite a mess with water while fighting for their life. The killer in this story wouldn't have planned for that mess and wouldn't have thought to bring towels to clean up with, nor did they have the time to do it since a party was going on and they'd have had to be very quick with the murder.
I don't care for Poirot. It's not likely in real life that an investigator's going to be discussing his cases with people other than those in law enforcement like he did in this book. He's a know-it-all who always just happens to figure everything out on his own.
Thank you to Jason for sending this to me.
