What you’d expect, really. A fiendishly difficult puzzle which has a deceptively simple reveal at the end, leaving one to think, “Ah, of course, well it was obvious really.” I formulated several hypotheses as to what had happened on Soldier Island, and all were spectacularly wrong.
It’s easy to deride Christie for her characters being little more than clichés (the world-weary adventurer, the brassy copper, the repressed spinster, the posh vulgar braggart and so on) but we don’t read these stories for character arcs. We read them as an exercise, as a cryptic crossword. In that respect the book is tight, efficient and enjoyable.
