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.
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Published by Dan Jones
I'm a science fiction writer and podcaster.
My debut novel Man O’War was published in 2018 by Snowbooks, and I’ve had a few short stories published here and there.
I also host Chronscast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science-fiction and fantasy community.
Away from writing I work for the UK Space Agency on a programme of space robotics for advanced satellite and planetary exploration technologies. All of which comes in rather handy when coming up with new ideas for science fiction stories.
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