Sophie Hannah - The Mystery of Three-Quarters

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable - in the end

In the end I enjoyed The Mystery Of Three-Quarters, but it was hard going for a while.

Sophie Hannah has done a good job of creating a Christie-style mystery, with an intriguing puzzle, odd clues, red herrings and a lengthy climactic meeting of all possible suspects in which Poirot reveals the true culprit. The first half was a bit of a struggle, as the characters and the strange mystery of the accusatory letters in Poirot’s name are introduced. It all seemed a bit laboured and disjointed, but things moved along much better in the second half and I ended up in that old state of ought-to-be doing-something-else-but-must-finish the-book, which is always a good sign.

Part of the problem is that I found very little in the way of period setting. This mattered less as the story began to rattle along, but it was a disappointment for me. It’s not that Sophie Hannah gets it badly wrong – she’s far too good a writer for that – but somehow I never felt that we were in the 1930s. The language was generally pretty well done, but there were occasional things like an ancient family servant saying, “I’ve set up the two machines for Mr Porrott, like you asked, Mrs Lavington.” Surely he would have said something more like “I have set up the two machines as you requested...” There wasn’t too much of this but it did grate occasionally.

This ended up as a four-star read for me; it’s fun but be prepared for a somewhat stodgy first half.

(My thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC via Netgalley.)