CROOKED HOUSE - Agatha Christie

Known hands-down as the most popular mystery writer of all time, nearly forty years after her death Agatha Christie remains a bestselling author whose novels have still only been outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible.  Crooked House - one of Christie's own personal favorites, and indeed my favorite of her books - is a complex story about a very dysfunctional family, led by the patriarch Aristide Leonides, who is summarily poisoned in the midst of his ungrateful relatives, all of whom have motives ... and alibis!  Two intriguing things about this novel (other than its jaw-dropper of an ending) are the richer-than-usual characterizations Christie fills the pages with; never more so, in the close to eighty novels of hers that I've read over the years, have her people come off more real.  The other, simply put, is that this tale doesn't feature any of her usual detectives on-board to solve the case; no Poirot, no Miss Marple, or Tuppence and Tommy or Superintendent Battle, or even Ariadne Oliver.  And this, perhaps, is another reason the novel works so beautifully; there are no distractions from the story, nor from the intricate family and their secrets and associations with each other; they, as it should be, are your focus for this tale of murder.  But even with that, I still dare you to see that ending coming!  ****1/2