My last encounter with Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs (Murder in Retrospect), really stuck with me. There was something that she captured between those pages that my mind couldn’t leave alone – the tragedy of it all. It’s been several months, and yet my thoughts continually drift back to the characters, the setting, and paint drying on a canvas.
It’s a rare thing for me to really be impacted by a mystery book. Christianna Brand has a certain knack for it – creating a cast of characters so richly painted that it becomes anguishing in the end when one of them is revealed to be a killer. John Dickson Carr was less effective at it, but he had his moment with books like He Who Whispers and She Died a Lady – titles in which some element of the story pulls at the mind long after the book is set down.