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Closed Casket: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries) Paperback – Illustrated, June 6, 2017

by Sophie Hannah (Author), Agatha Christie (Author)

4.0 5,328 ratings

Book 2 of 5: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery

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The world’s most famous detective – and Agatha Christie’s most famous creation – returns in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Monogram Murders: a diabolically clever mystery soaked in period atmosphere and loaded with clues, suspense, and danger.

Praise for the New York Times bestseller THE MONOGRAM MURDERS:

“I was thrilled to see Hercule Poirot in such very, very good hands.” –Gillian Flynn

“Perfect . . . a pure treat.” –Tana French

“As tricky as anything written by Agatha Christie.” –Alexander McCall Smith

“Terrific . . . uncanny. Bravo!” –The Boston Globe

“Sharply written and rigorously plotted, this Poirot mystery rivals many of Christie’s own.” –NPR

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Popular Highlights in this book

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“Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.”
Highlighted by 76 Kindle readers
Most people are scared of most things—never forget that! It is really only writers and artists who can cope with the puzzling ambiguities—and those with an investigative inclination.
Highlighted by 70 Kindle readers
Conceal and reveal: how appropriate that those two words should rhyme. They sound like opposites and yet, as all good storytellers know, much can be revealed by the tiniest attempts at concealment, and new revelations often hide as much as they make plain.
Highlighted by 67 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

More from bestselling author Sophie Hannah


	The Killings at Kingfisher Hill	The Mystery of Three Quarters	Closed Casket	The Monogram Murders

Customer Reviews	3,590	3,384	5,328	6,936
Price	$13.43	$10.99	$11.39	$11.54

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“Classic Christie . . . Captures the essence of the originals without being a slavish imitation . . . Clues emerge, but the case remains perplexing. Christie aficionados will delight in the familiar repartee and the intricate deduction of the solution.” — Washington Post

“Equal parts charming and ingenious, dark and quirky and utterly engaging…I was thrilled to see Poirot in such very, very good hands. Reading The Monogram Murders was like returning to a favorite room of a long-lost home.” — Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl

“Perfect...a pure treat for Agatha Christie fans.” — Tana French, New York Times betselling author of The Secret Place

“Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders does Christie proud. Our favorite detective is back and in impeccable form!” — Charles Todd, New York Times bestselling author of An Unwilling Accomplice

“Sophie Hannah is a prodigious talent. I can’t wait to see what she does next.” — Laura Lippman

“Sophie Hannah’s idea for a plot line was so compelling and her passion for my grandmother’s work so strong, that we felt that the time was right for a new Christie to be written.” — Mathew Prichard, grandson of Agatha Christie

From the Back Cover

“What I intend to say to you will come as a shock . . .”

With these words, Lady Athelinda Playford springs a surprise on the lawyer entrusted with her will. As guests arrive for a party at her Irish mansion, Lady Playford has decided to cut off her two children without a penny . . . and leave her vast fortune to an invalid who has only weeks to live. Among Lady Playford’s visitors are two strangers: the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard. Neither knows why he has been invited—until Poirot begins to wonder if Lady Playford expects a murder. But why does she seem so determined to provoke a killer? And why—when the crime is committed, despite Poirot’s best efforts to stop it—does the identity of the victim make no sense at all?

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks; Illustrated edition (June 6, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062458833
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062458834
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.72 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,172,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,345 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books)
- #11,335 in Historical Mystery
- #18,932 in Amateur Sleuths

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4.0 5,328 ratings

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Sophie Hannah

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Hello! Welcome to my Amazon Author Page, and thank you for your interest in me and my books. Below you will find my official biog and all my online links so that you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You'll also find a link to my Dream Author Coaching Programme for writers, which launched in September 2019.

Oh, and you can see some cute photos of my amazing dog Brewster on this page too! He often leaps onto my laptop while I'm writing and deletes entire paragraphs by accident - so you could say he's a regular contributor to my literary efforts!

If you would like to receive my monthly newsletter (in which I give away freebies and share scandal, gossip and intrigue) you can sign up at the bottom of the home page of my website, sophiehannah.com. And if you want to contact me directly (to say you've loved a book of mine, or even to complain vociferously about one of my books), email sophie@sophiehannah.com. I'm always delighted to hear from my readers!

Sophie xx

My Official Biography is as follows:

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling crime fiction writer whose books have sold millions of copies worldwide. Her crime novels have been translated into 49 languages and published in 51 countries. Her psychological thriller The Carrier won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the 2013 UK National Book Awards. In 2014 and 2016, Sophie published The Monogram Murders and Closed Casket, the first new Hercule Poirot mysteries since Agatha Christie's death, both of which were national and international bestsellers. She went on to publish a third, The Mystery of Three Quarters in 2018 which was an instant bestseller, and her fourth Poirot novel, The Killings at Kingfisher Hill will be published in August 2020. Sophie helped to create a Master’s Degree in Crime and Thriller Writing at the University of Cambridge, for which she is the main teacher and Course Director. She is also the founder of the Dream Author Coaching Programme for writers which launched in September 2019.

Sophie is also an award-winning, bestselling poet, and her poetry is studied at GCSE level across the UK. She has co-written two murder mystery musicals with composer Annette Armitage: The Mystery of Mr. E and Work Experience. She has written a self-help book called How To Hold a Grudge: From Resentment to Contentment - The Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life, and hosts the How to Hold a Grudge podcast.

Sophie lives with her husband, children and dog in Cambridge, where she is an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.

And I can be found online here:

Website: www.sophiehannah.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/sophiehannahauthor/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/sophiehannahwriter/

Twitter: www.twitter.com/sophiehannahCB1

http://dreamauthorcoaching.com

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/how-to-hold-a-grudge/id1439465411

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J Lee

Awesome read

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2024

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Love that someone has continued Agatha Christie mystery series.

Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2024

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A good story that is reminiscent of a Poirot book. I wish he had a bigger role. It was more a murder mystery that he solved by not being in the middle of the investigation.

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T.

An improvement over the previous Poirot novel, but still not worth reading.

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2016

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This novel is the second new Poirot story written by Sophie Hannah. I haven't read Hannah's other works, but I have read The Monogram Murders, the first novel she wrote with Poirot. I don't know if it's a feature of her work in general, but those two novels share many inelegant commonalities: the plot device of inauthentic, contrived conversations that are conveniently overheard and misunderstood; chapters that ramble on about some event in the past that somehow set up the current situation; and epicycles upon epicycles of complications that contribute nothing beyond padding out the book length and artificially obscuring the mystery's solution.

The writing in the book is fine: unremarkable, but not terribly distracting. Christie's dialogue was workmanlike but had a parsimonious efficiency to it. Here, characters just ramble on uninterestingly. The writing outside dialogue isn't much better. Catchpool is apparently psychic. When he's in conversations, we're told that his interlocutors speak as if they're concealing a secret, or that they're boiling with rage, or have some other emotion or concern. Yet there's nothing in the conversation itself to indicate that fact, and the reader isn't given any physical description or actions to corroborate it. We're just flat-out told, rather than shown, what people think. That's poor writing in general, but it's damning in a mystery novel. The reader should be drawing his own conclusions about the characters; instead, we're dependent on Catchpool not just for the facts of the case but also their interpretation.

The mystery itself has some compelling points. Without revealing any spoilers, you can clearly tell what part of the solution was the hook the author set for the story, and it's indeed worth basing a novel on (which I would not have said about the scenario in its predecessor). It's a clever setup, although its execution is not worthy of it.

I gave up trying to solve the mystery about halfway through. I lost confidence in the author's ability to tell a compact, self-contained story without a revelation three-quarters of the way through the book that some of the characters had a heretofore unrevealed secret backstory with the murder victim. That happened in the predecessor to this novel, and it happened in the current one as well. A murder mystery is supposed to be a puzzle for the reader to solve. With Catchpool's magical insights spoiling the current investigation and the unknowable backstory spoiling the murder itself, it's not a fair game. Instead of solving the mystery, I just patiently waited for the ending for the author to pull some arbitrary solution out of her hat. That solution had some gaping holes in it (for example, without introducing spoilers, the murder has no reason to be carrying around the murder weapon, and the novel lampshades this fact), but it more or less makes sense. It's not completely satisfying, but it's a definite improvement over the solution of the Monogram Murders.

So, how is the book overall?

As a reincarnation of Poirot, it feels clunky and fake. There's no real need for Poirot to even be in the novel; what little characterization occurs is mostly of Catchpool, the Hastings substitute.

As a reincarnation of Agatha Christie, it's just not up to the task. It feels like an ersatz knockoff: someone who's copied a few of the mannerisms but missed the whole point of the writing.

As a revival of a Golden-Age-style murder mystery, it's a respectable effort. It's not great, but I didn't feel cheated after reading it. It's bloated and needlessly complex, and the author ruins a genuinely good idea with tedious backstories and complications for the sake of complications. Christie at her best was a master of economy: the story fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, with no unnecessary pieces and no need to artificially shove pieces together. Hannah didn't meet that standard. With a better editor--- not just a copy-editor (though the dialogue could use some work), but someone to polish down the story to its deserving essentials--- she could have had a good story. As it stands, it's a decent but unspectacular one. I don't feel cheated or disappointed for it, but in retrospect I should have just read the first and last chapters.

The book is decent enough that I'll read Hannah's next Poirot novel, but I wouldn't recommend this one. If Hannah improves in future stories, I'd recommend readers just skip to the later books in the series. If she doesn't improve, I'd recommend readers avoid her novels altogether. This novel is just mediocre.

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whitney d

EXTRAORDINARILY EXTRAORDINARY

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2024

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Never in 1 million years did I think that I could ever love anyone bringing back to life the most incredible Hercule Poirot. How delightfully thrilled I was to realize that I was wrong. Granted the intensity of his personality was softened, but I chalked that up to aging. This is the second book in the series that I’ve read, and I have every intention of reading all of them.

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Linda Cross, The Art of Escape

Excellent writing

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2019

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I really enjoyed this, my first Sophie Hannah. I'm definitely an Agatha Christie fan, and I was pleasantly surprised. Hannah is an excellent writer. Actually, in terms of memorable lines, more than a bit better than Christie herself! The only unsatisfactory part was the ending. Not quite clever or concise enough to compete with Dame Agatha's. Still, the book overall was more than very good.

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2024

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No problems at all with the shipping. I liked the book too

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Deiseach

Better effort this time round

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2020

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Improved in that Inspector Catchpool is making no pretence at being an actual policeman (he takes a couple of weeks off to visit an Irish estate, in the mistaken belief that his fame and prowess are such that anyone would want him as a consultant on writing their next mystery novel). His superiors are seemingly happy that one of their officers will not be available for work and indeed not even in the same country, so this lets us know how much of a difference to the crime rate his presence makes. This is very definitely not a police procedural, and the authoress is even indifferent to the "oh yeah, I guess this person would be arrested as an accomplice" considerations at the end where even Christie was careful to have the perpetrators arrested or otherwise dealt with by the law.

The novel is ostensibly set in Ireland but don't let that worry you; for all the effort the authoress makes towards scene-setting, it might as well be set in Gloucestershire or New Zealand. Everyone is English, not Anglo-Irish, save for one lone American who is so assimilated to being English he has even dropped his accent and any republican/democratic attitudes he might have picked up. The staff, presumably, are locals but even there we don't know, they might have been imported from Her Ladyship's London houses for all the "yes, these are local people from the vicinity" impressions we get.

The plot is interesting, because plot (and not characters, description, pacing or credibility) is our authoress' sole strong point, but once again she maintains that Poirot is driven by the psychology of the crime and criminals, not by physical evidence. Granted, this is how Christie established the character, but then she did take care to give us the psychology of everyone involved, even the minor characters. Our authoress isn't interested in this, so the two-dimensional characters don't even get the amount of fleshing out that Christie would have done to keep us guessing as to "could it really be X, despite the fact that they seem so innocuous?" Reading this, you can immediately write off a few of the red herrings as there's no way they can be credible as possible murderers.

In the same way, Catchpool is very irritating as, at one point, he literally steps in a clue. In a Christie novel, he would have mentioned this in passing to Poirot and we could see how this works into the conclusion but our authoress doesn't even bother with this - she may put words into the mouth of her lady novelist that 'she doesn't write plots for idiots' but she forgets the rule of Chekov's gun: if you show something, you have to make use of it. Astute readers (or those who have been able to keep a tight grip on the scattershot of details the plot strews about) may remember, when the Big Reveal is being done, "oh yes - *this* is what *that* was about!" but it's equally as likely you will have forgotten this was in fact a pointer towards the solution.

Speaking of the psychology of the characters, a Christie story would have been fair to everyone: pointing out, for example, the hypocrisy of the lady novelist and how she twisted the family and circumstances around her, contributing to the crime happening in the first place. The one-dimensional character of the son would have been fleshed out to give him his real virtues: family loyalty, steadfastness and so forth. Perhaps the lady novelist is meant to be an authorial self-insert, because instead here the characters are left with the obvious surface traits and no delving beneath the shallow first impressions to a deeper pyschology, so at worst she is guilty of nothing more than being deceived by an opportunist, and at best she was right all along. Note to the curious: she was *not* right all along.

So the good parts: more of Poirot, Catchpool is obviously the redundant nuisance (he's not even on the same level as Captain Hastings as trying to solve the crime for himself) and sticks to just doing whatever Poirot tells him to do, and a decent plot. Bad parts: no sense of place or setting, characters not developed, Catchpool only does what Poirot tells him despite being smack in the middle of a crime scene (e.g. when Poirot goes off to London to chase up a lead, our hero has a nice lie-in for the day), little to no interest in wrapping up loose ends once the Big Reveal and the main murderer is unmasked is done. A better effort but still not on the level of Christie's original.

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Amazon Customer

Fun to Read

Reviewed in Canada on February 17, 2021

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Book was fun to read and a good value

Dora Bereczki

Good to have new Poirot stories

Reviewed in Germany on April 2, 2021

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I liked the book and absolutely like the fact that Poirot lives again. The story is interesting but not as well written as Christie's stories but I like it notheless. I'll buy the following ones too.

LPC

Entretenido

Reviewed in Spain on January 22, 2018

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Igual que el anterior libro de Sophie Hannah, entretenido y aunque el estilo no sea exactamente el de A. Christie para mí merece la pena leerlo

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Magnetic Book

Reviewed in India on August 10, 2018

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Wonderful writing. Hercule Poirot resurrected. Clever plot . Engrossing.
Worthy to read.

Frederico Silva

A must-have for all Poirot enthusiasts.

Reviewed in France on November 8, 2016

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Just buy it, you know you want to.
If you're a Poitot fan and you still can't accept the fact that dear old Agatha can't write anymore novels then this is the thing for you.

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