3 Christies, 3ish Weeks... What Was I Thinking?!

While in the mist of my Easter Break, I went down a bit of rabbit hole with audiobooks and going "Sod it! Let me do my weird thing" and Audible decide to do a huge sale on all their audiobooks (I become a member again. No idea why. Oh yes, the offer of three months for 99p per month.) And, like the basic so&so, I love a good sale. And, finally, I decide to get those Agatha Christie's I've had my eye on: Cards on the Table. And then, a few days later, The Hollow and after a day of listening to The Hollow, Five Little Pigs. 

This is the order I bought them and listened to them, but if you are a Christie fan, all of these are Poirot investigations. Cards on the Table is his 15th outing, Five Little Pigs (or Murder is Retrospect, depending where you live in the world) is Poirot's 25th and The Hollow (or Murder After Hours, again depending where you live in the world) is the 26th instalment. 

So, yes, am listening to them in the wrong order and yes, I got a little sick of Christie last year so had to quit her for a while. I had plan to read other crime authors from the Golden Age of Crime (Dorothy L Sayers's Whose Body, Joesphine Tey's Daughter of Time and Ngaio Marsh's A Man Lay Dead to name a few) and some newer authors (PD James and Ruth Rendell among others), but Christie is the Queen of Crime and when these title are under a fiver, how was I to refuse?

Ok, going to be keep of each of these and I don't want this post to be too long. 

Cards on the Table is a locked-room mystery: four guests at a party play the card game Bridge while the host is in chair by the fire. No one enters or leave the room, but by the end of the night, the host has been stabbed and one of the four did it. The host, before he was murdered, believed these four had killed once before and got away with it. But who among the four has just killed again, and will they get away with it? 

The Hollow is a different animal. Poirot is invited to lunch with his holiday home neighbours in the country. When he turns up, he discovers a man dying by the side of the pool, his wife standing over him. He was shot and the wife is holding the gun. The wife claims she picked the gun ups without thinking when she discovered her dying husband. Is she telling the truth or did she pull the trigger? 

And Five Little Pigs is, again, completely different. Poirot is visited in his London flat by a young woman. She is going to be married soon, but she wants Poirot is look into her past. Sixteen years ago, when she was a child, her father was poisoned and her mother was arrested and sent to jail for it. But the now grown-up daughter isn't so such. She believes her mother is innocent and asked Poirot to investigate. If it wasn't her mother who killed her father, one of their five house guest poisoned him and let an innocent woman go to jail...

GoodRead - "The Hollow" Review

Imagine you’re at your best friend’s funeral, but they’re going to bury an empty coffin.

That’s what happens to Abbey at the start of “The Hollow” by Jessica Verday. Abbey is at the funeral home for the town of Sleep Hollow (yes, THAT Sleepy Hollow), trying to understand why her best friend, Kristen, would suddenly disappear. It’s at Kristen wake that she meets the mysterious (and, of course, drop-dead gorgeous) Caspian.

This is the story of Abbey trying to come to make sense of Kristen’s disappearance and her slowly growing relationship with Caspian…

I quite like this book. Not only do I like the fact that every chapter starts with a short quote from the original “Sleepy Hollow” story, but it stands up by itself, not really needing the Sleepy Hollow legend to survive (though it does reference the story in several places…). As for the love story element in it, I feel that most readers of the Twilight Saga will like this book.

(But saying that though, the last few books I have read recently [that I have and haven’t reviewed] I think most Twilight fans would like…)

There’s, also, a slight edge of “Things are not what they seems” with this book and with one or two of the characters (won’t spoil it by saying who!) and that gives the book a mysterious edge.

And from that, am making the book seems like a dark read. It’s not. The romantic in the story lightens the tone and then there’s Ben… one of my fave characters… he definitely lightens the tone!

Now, there is something I need to say that might put people off so am stating it now: this is the first book in a Trilogy and, for some people; the ending might be seen as a very “open” ending. There is a sense of closure, but some people (myself included) could easily see that it’s open and I know some people might find that irritating.

I will be reading the next book in the trilogy (rumours are flying that the next book is going to be called “The Haunting”…) and I hope that there will be some answers (as the author promises us. She said that book 1 is about questions, book 2 is about answers and book 3 is about choices… remember that, folks…). And I hope she writes more of Ben! Please, Jessica, more Ben!

(Couldn’t find a place for this in review but, because there’s something about the book that lingers in the mind [very much like Shiver and other books of late]. So much so that I kept finding songs on my iPod that I found relatable to “The Hollow” [that is very surprising!] The first song that I thought of [and the only song I can remember off the top of my head at the moment] is “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine - and here's the link for you all to investigate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1BgYTZ4Mxc)

"The Hollow" & Raven Hair

A while ago, I showed you the picture "Rhinos in Bed" by Michael Dashow that a Twitter Friend of mine (http://twitter.com/really_rachel) showed me and I fell in love with...

Now, am reading a book called "The Hollow" by Jessica Verday and, while I was reading chapter 9 ("Prom Night"), one of his other painting came to mind and I thought I would share this image with you.

It's called "Raven Hair" and it's, again, a painting I love!