Thursday 9 April 2015

Review: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie

Synopsis
"Ten . . ."
Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious "U.N. Owen."

"Nine . . ."
At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead.

"Eight . . ."
Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one . . . one by one they begin to die.

"Seven . . ."
Who among them is the killer and will any of them survive?


AGATHA CHRISTIE
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, England, U.K., as the youngest of three. The Millers had two other children: Margaret Frary Miller (1879–1950), called Madge, who was eleven years Agatha's senior, and Louis Montant Miller (1880–1929), called Monty, ten years older than Agatha. 

During the First World War, she worked at a hospital as a nurse; later working at a hospital pharmacy, a job that influenced her work, as many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison.

On Christmas Eve 1914 Agatha married Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks. They divorced in 1928, two years after Christie discovered her husband was having an affair.


REVIEW


I think the only reason this didn't appeal to me in the way it has many others is because I could guess the murderer from the beginning. But, slowly, lines got blurred and I started to guess other people. I had two guesses right from the beginning. And when I had a guess, in the end of the story, I was correct. And then I wasn't. Honestly, I got very frustrated with this book. I was wrong, but I was also right in my guess. And this is a reason for why I didn't like this book. I will say this though: Agatha Christie is very good at mystery books. She set up the story so well right from the beginning and I just chose to ignore all the warning signs. I wanted to go with my gut, but didn't. Unfortunately: if I had, I would have been right.

I found that I loved the poem in the book, the Ten Little Indians story. It was fascinating and interesting. Very interesting indeed, because slowly each murder was going about just as each "indian" was gotten rid of in the poem. The story was easy to get through and certainly held the readers attention, however, I found that what really got me was the names. They frustrated me to no end; how was I suppose to remember all those names and who they were? It was hard for me to follow sometimes and by the time I actually got the hang of who everyone was, half the people were slaughtered.

The story was interesting enough to captivate me, but not interesting enough for a higher rating. It reminded me a lot of the movie Clue.

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