Abandoned by user

Moving onto our discussion of the most contrived or ridiculous Poirot plot! We both had a few contenders. Obsidian Blue chose between Third Girl, After the Flood and her final selection. I considered The Clocks and The Big Four before finally settling on my choice! Both of these books deserve some serious side-eye!

This is basically us, looking at Agatha Christie. WTF were you thinking, Dame Agatha?

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Obsidian Blue's opinion

Alright here is my most contrived/ridiculous book pick for Friday.

For me hands down it has to be "The Clocks". I dithered between this book "Third Girl", and "After the Flood" but in the end "The Clocks" won out. I will go down fighting and argue with anyone that the ending to "After the Flood" was one of the worst endings to a Hercule Poirot book I have ever read. It still makes me mad.

Ahem, I digress. Told in the first person by someone who is a son of someone who has worked with Poirot in the past and the third person just made the book unreadable in parts.

We had (though readers don't realize it until the very end) two plots going on. Plot one is who murdered a mysterious John Doe that was found in a blind woman's home. And the second plot is some undercover spy bits dealing with communist sympathizers who apparently run amok in this neighborhood. I think in the end everyone was connected to the communists and I kind of had to laugh.

I think I finally threw in the towel in this book after the male hero decided that a woman who was looking like she may be connected to the murder, was someone he was going to marry anyway. He kept referring to her as 'his girl' and he didn't care that she lied, he would keep that in mind in the future (excuse me why I go off and dry heave somewhere) and was totally prepared to give up his future for her.

The ending when it came was a joke. We find out who killed the mysterious John Doe and why (due to a witness that could just see everything that was carried out) and we find out what case our hero was really looking into. I called foul on the whole book especially because once again Christie left out key parts that would have shown the readers who the real culprits were in this book. Instead things are revealed at the end by the hero and Poirot.

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Moonlight Reader's opinion: 

Yeah, The Clocks is up there for me, too, but I am picking Third Girl!

There were a few books where the solution to the murder is impossible and ridiculous and so complicated that in a million years it could never work. That is how Third Girl seemed to me, from beginning (when the "Third Girl" stumbles into Poirot's living room claiming that she might have murdered someone, but she isn't entirely certain, decides he is too old to help her and then disappears), to the bitter, bitter end.

It is impossible to fully discuss the crazy that is this book without giving away the entire plot. I'm not sure how much that matters, since the plot is basically terrible, but I'll do my best not to completely spoil this festival of dumb-shittery for anyone who might decide to pick it up. Suffice it to say that the book relies entirely on one of the characters being too dense to figure out that one of her roommates is also her step-mother.

What is this madness, you might ask - and it would be a fair question. I don't know about you, but this happens to me all the time. I'm living with someone, making a bag of microwave popcorn, and suddenly realize "ZOMG, you're one of the relatives I spent with the weekend with, in a wig and bright red lipstick. How did I never notice this before?" What, you haven't had this experience? Scoff.

And then there was the part where they were keeping her stupid by carefully calibrating and surreptitiously administering street drugs to her, with careful combinations of uppers and downers, which she neither figured out, nor caused her to overdose. Eye roll. And Ariadne Oliver bumbling about like a buffoon getting conked on the noggin.

This book was an epic train wreck.

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I just have to add, these posts are so much fun to write! You can find our other two joint posts here:

The Most Surprising Poirot

The Most Boring Poirot

Next up: The Victim Most In Need of a Solid Bludgeoning. Find it on Blue's blog, on Saturday!