Funerals are Fatal by Agatha Christie

I chose this book, as it was the only Agatha Christie I have that I haven't read yet, for some weird reason. Maybe it was because the cover wasn't as appealing as the others, reason being, this copy is from 1953 (it was in my grandmother's house) and looks very battered and discoloured!

Agatha Christie is by far my favourite author of all time. She has written so many books, and they're all so unique with canny plot twists and really, really random clues: like a tanning lotion bottle from 'Evil Under the Sun' or fake flowers from this book.

Agatha Christie often writes about the famous Belgian, not French, detective, Hercule Poirot. He asks the weirdest but cleverest questions and solves the weirdest crimes.

I'm currently on page 110 of the 213 pages of Funerals are Fatal. So far, the oldest man of the family died, suddenly but nothing was though of it. At the funeral party, all his family plus lawyer were gathered. Towards the end of the party the rather eccentric, naive sister of the dead mean blurted out something rather strange. 'But he was murdered, wasn't he!?' Everyone had been told that he had died in his sleep, of a disease he had been suffering with for some years. But, for some reason Cora had thought differently. The day after she was killed with a hatchet.

Mr Entwhistle, the deceased man's lawyer is given the task of tracking down Cora's murderer and possibly her brother's. With Mr. Poirot to help him, I'm pretty certain they'll be able to, but at the moment, in the book, I have absolutely no idea who it could possibly be.

The setting isn't very clear in this novel, however I do know that, at the moment anyway, the story starts in the dead man's home, at the funeral party. It is a very large house, almost like a manor house and its empty rooms have lack of laughter and children. The book is also largely set in the deceased Cora's cottage, where her housemaid is currently living until the cottage is sold. Furnished with tacky, ugly, modern furniture and paintings of nudes and the coast, it isn't exactly what one would call beautiful. It shows that Cora wasn't exactly 'well-off.'

The time is definitely shortly after the war as Cora's housemaid had to sell a tea-shop she owned because of lack of stock during the war and therefore had to come and work for Cora. This is the only indication of time in the story, so I have absolutely no idea of the exact year or even season.

The mood, as it often is with Agatha Christie's, is full of suspense. One feels the suspense the most in Cora's cottage due to the fact that someone died there, not naturally but of murder. The novel often says how her housemaid is extremely creeped out by the whole thing and won't go into Cora's room even though it was cleaned about fifty times over. Otherwise, it is very tense as their is tension between the detectives and the interviewees as they do not want to be suspected of the murder.

At the moment, I give this novel a 9.9 out of 10 only because it is extremely rare for me to give a book a 10. It is extremely gripping and I strongly recommend it.