The model is clearly Agatha Christie, yet the excruciatingly woolly dialogue reads more like George V. Higgins inexplicably...
Posadas pushes the high-concept whodunit pastiche of Little Indiscretions (2003) a step further into high comedy, without a single laugh.
Now that Rafael Molinet’s mother has died, he’s both bankrupt and friendless. With nothing left to live for, he decides after a last chat with his niece Fernanda to take an overdose of pills—not in his threadbare London apartment, but as the climax of a two-week vacation at L’Hirondelle d’Or, a luxurious desert spa 65 miles from Fez. While he’s waiting to run up one last bill he won’t be paying, he cheerlessly amuses himself by observing his fellow guests: the distinguished Marquis de Cuevas, recently widowed Mercedes Algorta, radio personality Antonio Sánchez López, his black-sheep blue-blood companion Ana Fernández de Bugambilla, screenwriter Santiago Arce and long-time lovers Bernardo and Bea, who imagine nobody knows about their very public affair. Fortified by a steady diet of newsy faxes from Fernanda to Molinet, as well as book proposals from junkyard dog publisher Juan Pedro Bonilla to the rest of the cast, the principals hunker down to two-dozen rounds of Pimms, very dry martinis and monumentally trivial gossip. But a funny thing happens on the way to Molinet’s funeral. A chance remark by another guest—“Did SHE let him die?”—causes him to link the recent death of Mercedes’ husband Jaime Valdés, who choked to death on an almond, with the demise long ago of his father, Bertie Molinet, who fell down a long flight of stairs under the eyes of three ill-assorted witnesses. It isn’t long (though it sure seems long) before Molinet is contemplating a third mysterious death that still isn’t his.
The model is clearly Agatha Christie, yet the excruciatingly woolly dialogue reads more like George V. Higgins inexplicably passing the time at a Moroccan spa.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50886-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
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