THE LAST DEATH OF THE YEAR

New Year’s Eve 1932 finds Hercule Poirot and his latter-day amanuensis, Scotland Yard Inspector Edward Catchpool, on the idyllic Greek island of Lamperos for what only one of them believes will be a holiday.

Everyone who takes up residence at Nash Athanasiou’s House of Perpetual Welcome on Liakada Bay has agreed to forgive everyone else for all the past misdeeds they admit. But someone seems to be piling up current misdeeds as well, as Poirot acknowledges when Catchpool presses him on the reason they’ve come. Someone, it seems, has tried to push relentlessly flirtatious Pearl St Germain off her terrace, leading Nash to call on Poirot. Pearl, whose recent conquests include Nash’s assistant and Very Good Friend Matthew Fair, whom she attracted away from his fiancée, Rhoda Haslop, and discarded in record time, plays an even more disturbing role. When American-born Austin Lanyon, Nash’s other assistant and Very Good Friend, proposes a game involving identifying everyone’s anonymous New Year’s resolutions, Pearl, or someone imitating her handwriting, resolves to murder Matthew, making his both the last death and the first death of the year. Despite Poirot and Catchpool’s attempts to protect Matthew, he’s stabbed to death, and the game is afoot. Unlike such Agatha Christie classics as Peril at End House and Murder on the Orient Express, Hannah’s pastiche isn’t a high-concept mystery whose secret can be explained in a sentence, but rather an archaeological dig for motives, deceptions, echoes, connections, and guilty secrets that make the obligatory postmortem interrogations just as fraught and fascinating as the circumstances of what will turn out to be the first murder.

Fans hoping to beat Poirot to the mind-bogglingly ingenious solution are well-advised to concede the competition in advance.