You want beauty. Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth I want. Always truth.
Hallowe'en Party
by Agatha Christie
Genre: Murder Mystery
About: Thirteen-year-old Joyce likes to impress anyone who'll listen with a tall tale. Her lies are usually wild and outlandish and very rarely believed. But during the preparations of a Halloween party she makes a claim of having seen a murder once. Although it seems as if no one believes her, she's later found dead - murdered herself. So someone had believed her, and now Poirot must solve not only Joyce's murder, but the murder she claimed to have seen all those years ago...
Thoughts
This was very different from the recent movie adaptation, A Haunting in Venice, and I actually prefer the movie's overall solution. The mystery element in Christie's was, as always, very good and kept me interested, but the solution didn't feel as satisfying or fit as smoothly as the movie's one because the murderer's motivation was a little harder to believe.
The characters were all interesting, and I liked that we were solving a murder from the past as well as the present and all the complicated layers that Poirot somehow makes sense of. So the story was compelling, even if the ending felt a little disappointing.
Of course I enjoyed Miss Oliver making her appearance and that there was no Hastings around. However I did find some of the conversations repetitive - especially the constant musings from everyone that it must be a lunatic behind the murder and all that talk of psychiatrist reports being nonsense or poorly managed. For one or two villagers to say this would have been fine, but for every person Poirot interviews to bring it up felt unnecessary.
Overall, it's a good layered mystery that dips in and out of being entertaining. The ending is not as solid as Christie's usual, at least to my mind, but it still works and has a memorable setting.
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