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Silvia

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Mrs. Jeffries and the Alms of the Angel (Mrs. Jeffries #38)

by Emily Brightwell

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Aug 26, 2019 01:15AM

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The Monogram Murders (New Hercule Poirot Mysteries, #1)

by Sophie Hannah (Goodreads Author)

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in September 2016

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Silvia said: " I never write reviews except when I absolutely love a book and I tend to be generous with ratings because I appreciate the effort an author puts in a book - but I am so irritated by this one.

The book is awful, tedious, boring, badly written, badly pl I never write reviews except when I absolutely love a book and I tend to be generous with ratings because I appreciate the effort an author puts in a book - but I am so irritated by this one.

The book is awful, tedious, boring, badly written, badly plotted, and badly characterized. I have more than 1200 books in my kindle most of which are misteries and none are as terribly bad, pretentious, needlessly complicated, and embarrassingly bad as this one. The complacency of the author with her "Aknowledgements" at the end of the book is emetic.
The characters are simply appalling, badly drawn, full of holes, contradictions, and totally unbelievable. The "Poirot" character is a sacrilege: it is based on the mannerisms of the TV Series Poirot, but doesnt talk or act like him at all. The one that tells the story is a gormless character who is supposed to be an Inspector of Scotland Yard. But he is scared of corpses, he runs home leaving the crime scene "until tomorrow" to try to create one crossword puzzle (and he is such an idiot that he writes the questions first and then looks for words that match a number of letters - who would do it like that!!). An Inspector that goes to a village to question people, but lets everybody tell him, flat-out, they will not answer his questions (for no other reason that they dont want to), and so he runs back to London with his tail between his legs. An inspector that spends 2 full pages in an absolutely unintelligible conversation with a drunk, of which neither he nor us understand anything, but he can remember it word by word so that Poirot can build a whole theory on one word of it. An inspector that has no boss, no procedure, never goes to Scotland yard, never actually *does* anything but look stupid, and leaves all to Poirot. The story hints at some kind of trauma the man has- absolutely irrelevant, and boringly tedious every time it comes up.
There is also a waiter that is able to memorize another complicated conversation that makes no sense at all, and from which Poirot takes another great clue. The other characters are equally ludicrous and unbelievable, as well as mostly irrelevant.
The whole book is really dreadful, the absurdity of most that happens made me wonder if the author is really just wanting to have a laugh at the expense of the idiots like me that spent money on this.
The story starts with Poirot moving to a guest house - right next to his appartment- because he doesnt want to be bothered with work - and yet jumps at this stupid case and takes over the gormless inspector right away when he comes home -get this- running away from the crime scene because it upsets him (the Inspector)... A Poirot who drinks coffee (he did not - he drank tisanes and chocolate-) and so much that he has coffee BEFORE and after dinner!! Coffee spoils the apetite - nobody in their right minds would do that, especially with good coffee, perhaps with watery stuff.

The plot, is a spaghetti bowl where every Agatha Christie trick in her stories has been used 3 or 4 times. She managed to get away with it, even when they were improbable solutions, because she was careful in not adding improbability over improbability till it was all a ridiculous mess - which is what happens in this book.

The book is terrible, but the reason I am really irritated at this is I feel totally cheated by the references that appear in Amazon praising it. . Nobody with integrity could write those things if they had truly read this mess of a book. Especially Alexander Mccall Smith, who I had thought, through his Isabel Dalhousie novels, would be a person with integrity, and whose comment I believed in order to try this. ...more "

Sep 23, 2016 12:15AM · see review