Thanks to my lovely wife, I now read way more murder mystery novels than I ever did before. Not nearly as many as her who must have read like a billion of them this year alone, but still one every few weeks or so. In that genre, nobody is as famous as Agatha Christie, who has written (quick detour by Wikipedia…) sixty-six of them. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the fourth one I’ve had the pleasure of reading, and the third one with Hercule Poirot.

This mystery takes place in the small country village of King’s Abbot where the famous detective has just moved following his retirement. A wealthy man by the name of Roger Ackroyd is found murdered in his study under mysterious circumstances. Through the eyes of the narrator, doctor James Sheppard, we learn that his death might be connected to another pair of tragedies happening in the same village in the last year or so.

I don’t have a ton of other authors to compare Agatha Christie to, as I have read fewer than maybe ten crime novels, but it seems like her storytelling is much more straightforward than what I’ve seen from more contemporary authors. Poirot goes around questioning folks, observing various sites related to the crime, questions some more and eventually comes to a conclusion. A few of the other novels I’ve read spend more time in the protagonist’s personal life, his or her relationships with friends and coworkers. Here, it’s all about the investigation. The characters are developed only as far as it helps the story go along. It’s also a shorter book, around 300 pages.

Obviously I can’t talk that much about the crime itself, otherwise I’d be spoiling the whole thing. I’ll still say that the mystery itself is well constructed, and kept me guessing till the very end until there really was only one possibility. But that ending didn’t seem remotely possible until a few pages before the reveal. I thought it was clever how she set that up.

If you exclude “And Then There Were None” as a standalone book, this is the best of the three Agatha Christie novels I’ve read. I really enjoyed my time with it.