Abandoned by Booklikes

The is the 15th book featuring Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.

The plot of Cards on the Table is Poirot investigating what person out of a suspect list of four people killed the host.

Poirot comes across Mr. Shaitana after he tells him that he plans on having a dinner party with four sleuths (Poirot, Colonel Race, Superintendent Battle, and a crime writer by the name of Ariadne Oliver) and four supposed murderers (Dr. Roberts, Mrs. Lorrimer, Major Despard, and Anne Meredith) and wants to see if Poirot can discuss who has done what.

During dinner Shaitana makes a lot of veiled accusations and then proposes bridge for his dinner guests. Mr. Shaitana sits out on the games (he would make the numbers uneven) and then watches from a chair the people he has brought together.



I still shake my head at a man deciding to invite in four people he suspects of murder and then throws around a lot of accusations and thinks, hey nothing is going to happen to me.

So this is not a typical Hercule Poirot novel. We do have Poirot in it, however, we also have two other characters (Battle and Mrs. Oliver) involved with his investigation that also do some sleuthing that leads to figuring out a who dun it.

Poirot once again proves to be the smartest person in the room, right next to Superintendent Battle.

I actually enjoyed Battle seeming to be wooden and not clever and readers get to see how truly smart he is at realizing things about the people he is interviewing while researching their past. It was quite clever for Christie to explain his writings after he was done interviewing one of the suspects.

Mrs. Oliver actually grated quite a bit while I was reading. She was supposedly a feminist though I don't think Christie understood what the word meant at all. She seemed to think it meant, rude, brash, female, who believes that women are superior to men in all things.

Colonel Race is not really in this and honestly added very little to the book by being including.

However, through Race we do get to look at his character's supposed attitudes. One of Race's attitudes was that white men do not kill other men is just one of the many ways that I cringe sometimes while reading Christie.

Speaking of Battle leads into one of the reasons why I could not give this book a five star. That really is that even though I loved the overall mystery and figuring out who killed Mr. Shaitana, I have a hard time with some of the attitudes displayed in Christie's books. I am sure in Christie's age talking about "blacks" in this case Egyptians, Orientals (big huge sigh) and Jews was fairly typical. It still makes me flinch when I read sentences like this in books though because I know in this case Christie had no idea why this would or could be offensive to people decades later.

The flow of the book works very well, we start out with the victim, the scene of the crime, the initial interviews, the follow up interviews, and then the detectives coming together to discuss said suspects, and back at it again with Poirot wrapping things up.

The setting of Mr. Shaitana's home makes me think of some glorious place with trinkets displayed everywhere. Other than that all of the other places didn't really make an impact on me. Maybe it's because when we had the detectives following people here and there the locations did not matter, you were paying attention to what people where saying.

The ending was quite clever, though I do at times shake my head at how it seems like Poirot books always end with him catching the murderer after that person has killed someone else or someone else has randomly died in the books too. I swear if I heard Poirot's name I would be out of there as soon as possible.

Next up for my Poirot read:

Dumb Witness (Hercule Poirot #16)