Hercule Poirot is traveling by luxury passenger coach from London to the exclusive Kingfisher Hill estate. Richard Devonport has summoned the renowned detective to prove that his fiancée, Helen, is innocent of the murder of his brother, Frank. Poirot will have only days to investigate before Helen is hanged, but there is one strange condition attached: he must conceal his true reason for being there from the rest of the Devonport family.
Once again she ably channels Christie and delivers a deftly plotted, pleasingly intricate and thrillingly executed mystery ... Hannah keeps her readers on their toes through numerous twists and turns, right up until the trademark drawing-room denouement. We sift clues ... We weigh suspects ...'Poirot is the finest detective at work anywhere in the world,' remarks Catchpool at one point. It is good to see that he is still at work, in Hannah’s more than capable hands.
Hannah continues her fabulous run of tightly-wound mysteries with yet another compelling adventure starring the world’s most beloved detective, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot ... Nothing is quite what it seems in this brilliant novel from Hannah ... it’s clear Hannah has settled into the role of keeping Christie’s famed detective alive and well. Writing with authority here, she weaves a stunning plot that feels very much comparable to such iconic titles as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Make no mistake about it, this is the same Hercule Poirot fans know and love, but Hannah deserves all the recognition in the world and then some for modernizing the way in which the story’s told just enough that the pacing is noticeably quicker, making it that much harder to put it down ... Moreover, the incredible job Hannah’s done staying true to Christie’s characters, while also developing a mystery worthy of dropping them into, is just as impressive. There certainly was a time when it was hard to imagine anyone else writing Hercule Poirot, but Hannah’s emergence as one of the finest writers on the scene today has helped usher in a new era of old school mysteries—and just like before, Poirot is once again leading the way ... A masterfully plotted, mind-bending crime thriller that harkens back to the days when Agatha Christie ruled the genre, The Killings at Kingfisher Hill is hands down the best mystery novel of 2020 so far.
Fans of Agatha Christie will applaud that the Christie Estate has officially assigned author Sophie Hannah to continue the late author’s legacy of creating cozy English mysteries ... It might not be a bad idea to read some of the other Poirot novels written by this author to get into the manner of presentation before taking up this one ... the flow of the story is suitably Christie-like ... close enough to Christie’s own style that the reader could segue from Murder on the Orient Express into this present novel without a stumble.
