Sofa Spotlight - Towards Zero, Agatha Christie

This was not what I was expecting. I went into reading it blind, all I knew was that it was by Agatha Christie and would probably involve a murder or two, but I wasn’t sure who would be playing detective – Poirot or Marple. As it turned out it was neither, although Poirot did get a mention.

I wasn’t disappointed though. The idea was introduced by one of the characters early on as the hour of a murder being zero hour, and for a murder novel to be really good it should start long before that, with all the players being drawn together by different events that ultimately lead to murder. It was that same character, Mr Treves, who I thought would be murdered, and indeed he was murdered, and this made me very sad because he was so likeable.

What made this so good was the way everything was tied together. I almost felt at the beginning that it was too long of a build up to the action, but as it happened it worked well. I was annoyed that I didn’t work out who the murderer was but maybe that made it more fun.