Cat Among the Pigeons, by Agatha Christie
The Book
Miss Boulstrode wants to retire. Sure, she stared Meadowbank with Miss Chadwick, way back in the day, but it seems Miss Vansittart will be her choice of successor. But something is holding her back and she can't quite put her finger on why. She goes ahead, welcoming the students to Meadowbank, not knowing the seeds of murder have been planted in her very garden.
One of the girls is related to the personal pilot of head of Ramat, Prince Ali Yusef. Bob Rawlson, and he go way back, to their public school days. That's why Bob is entrusted to smuggle the emergency jewels out of Ramat the day of the revolution. Bob and Prince Ali then attempt to fly out of Ramat. Their plane crashes, leaving them both dead and everyone wondering what happened to the jewels.
Someone knows the truth. Someone knows where Bob hid them amongst his niece's things, even if Jennifer Sutcliffe does not. Several people are sent to infiltrate the school in an attempt to find and steal the jewels. Meanwhile Jennifer, not liking her tennis racquet, trades it with her roommate Julia.
First Miss Springer, the new PE teacher is murdered. And nobody can figure out why. Sure nobody liked her, and sure, she said she was great at uncovering secrets, but nobody expected murder. Parents begin to take their kids out of school. Then Princess Shiasta is kidnapped, and her uncle is quite upset. Then, Miss Vansittart is murdered and things are all a mess. In the wake of this, Julia discovers something surprising in her tennis racquet and heads to London to consult Hercule Poirot.
When he arrives, he tries to unravel things. Worried that he might succeed, someone has guess who the murderer is. And that someone wants tons of money to keep quiet. But that plan backfires and that person is murdered. With so many people dropping dead left and right, can Poirot save the school before the murder just walks away when the school closes?
My Thoughts
It took forever for this book to get started. It decidedly does not until Poirot arrives on the scene, at about two thirds of the way through the book. The set up is long, but not the longest in a Christie, it's complicated, and it's twisty. All things Christie is known for, but I felt this book lacked something driving the plot forward. Even when the murders started happening, I wasn't invested in the story until Poirot turned up. Once the book picked up, it was an easy read. And I finished it in a couple of hours.
How Much My Library Card Saved Me
This book came to me from Des Plaines Public Library. It's in pretty good condition, despite the slight water damage (noted by the checkout clerk and marked when I checked the book out) on the last third of the 260 pages. It picked up that damage sometime after it entered their collection in September of 2018 and it was kept on 9/22/2022 or so that marking inside the book say. It's interesting to read all of the coded, stray remarks inside a book. They aren't that hard to discover, usually a date, a set of initials, and a reason, sometimes coded, typically not, in the book. After you've read a few of them, it's not hard to decode, but then I suspect nobody is passing secret messages through random library books. The cover says it cost $13.99 when new. That's the number we will use.
This Book $13.99
Library Items Reviewed This Year $96.94
Private Books
This Book $00.00
Total of Private Books $52.75
Total of All Items Reviewed This Year $162.69
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