While there is some genuine tension building towards the murder, especially with characters declaring other people they dislike and perhaps would kill if they had the chance.

Clocking in at around 330 pages in the current paperback editions, this is quite long for an Agatha Christie novel and much of the first third of the book is all setup. The biggest issue for Death on the Nile is actually it’s length. Luckily Christie keeps things interesting by having more than one death occur on the Nile at crucial moments which helps keeps things interesting and starts weeding down the cast with one genuinely quite impactful death at around the two-thirds mark. There are however, too many characters with several taking a back seat and a long list of potential suspects who are disregarded once the murder actually happens putting them on the backseat. As this is set outside of the United Kingdom this does mean that the characters are more eccentric examples of the British and of course there are secrets for every character.

Now, it’s still from an Agatha Christie well in her prime so the unraveling of the mystery and her cast of characters are equally as fun as any other book. Perhaps expecting something as a spiritual follow up to Murder on the Orient Express is why this read was a bit underwhelming in places. This is a novel that has several interesting set pieces, puts the murder on a boat going down the Nile, and a red herring criminal conspiracy to bring in another of Christie’s lesser known detectives in Colonel Race who I am most familiar from Cards on the Table. While it does fit into the subset of Poirot stories with interesting locale against the usual British murder mystery format, it doesn’t support say a game changing twist or a particularly interesting comment on aristocracy like some of Christie’s other work.

Filmed as sequels to Murder on the Orient Express twice, adapted by Christie into a play, and adapted into a television drama twice it is perhaps fascinating to see why it isn’t as iconic as the former novel. Death on the Nile is perhaps the most adapted Poirot novel from Agatha Christie behind Murder on the Orient Express.

The book of jacob novel