At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Here are the flaws in this book, in my opinion: 1) Most of the detecting is done by some guy named Father, who is not Miss Marple. Miss Marple is just a clever, observant, author-pupeteered-lucky eyewitness. Boo to that. Don’t just sprinkle my Marple on like flavor-text. She’s got to be the detective! 2) Only one corpse and it happens too late in the book. By the time I got to the first dead body, every single clue had already been dropped, the story was basically over. That’s too late in the game. 3) The big reveal about the true nature of the hotel is too obvious. I won’t spoil it by saying what it is. But if I did you wouldn’t be missing much suspense.
Of course, I can’t construct a novel like this, so I shouldn’t be too critical! But compared to Nemesis or Death on the Nile, it’s just not as good.
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