: The cover states; "A new collection from the undisputed Queen of Crime." The word "new" is no longer applicable; it came out in 1991, but it certainly contains eight great short stories, and the author's sobriquet still remains applicable for sure!
: While playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. With his final breath the man opens his eyes and says, ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’
: While playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. With his final breath the man opens his eyes and says, ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’
: Evidence that clears the name of a boy sentenced for killing his adopted mother arrives too late to save his life – so who did kill her?
According to the courts, Jacko Argyle bludgeoned his mother to death with a poker. The sentence was life imprisonment
But when Dr Arthur Calgary turns up a year later with the proof that confirms Jacko’s innocence, he is too late – Jacko died behind bars from a bout of pneumonia.
: It is Christmas Eve. The Lee family reunion is shattered by a deafening crash of furniture, followed by a high-pitched wailing scream. Upstairs, the tyrannical Simeon Lee lies dead in a pool of blood, his throat slashed.
: Bereft of the three people she has held most dear - her mother, her daughter and her husband Dermot, who wants a divorce - Celia is on the verge of suicide. Then one night on an exotic island she meets Larraby, a successful portrait painter, and through a long night of talk reveals how she is afraid to commit herself to a second chance of happiness with another person, yet is not brave enough to face life alone. Can Larraby help Celia come to terms with the past or will they part, her outcome still uncertain?
: A seance in a snowbound Dartmoor house predicts a grisly murder…
In a remote house in the middle of Dartmoor, six shadowy figures huddle around a small table for a seance. Tension rises as the spirits spell out a chilling message: ‘Captain Trevelyan… dead… murder.’
: In 1939 while Europe teeters on the brink of war, ten strangers are invited to Soldier Island, an isolated rock near the Devon coast; cut off from the mainland with their generous hosts Mr and Mrs Owen mysteriously absent. They are each accused of murder when one of them dies. They realise they may be harbouring a murderer among them and the tension escalates as the survivors realize that the killer is not only among them but is preparing to strike again and again.
: Framed in the doorway of Poirot’s bedroom stood an uninvited guest, coated from head to foot in dust. The man’s gaunt face stared for a moment, then he swayed and fell. Who was he? Was he suffering from shock or just exhaustion? Above all, what was the significance of the figure 4, scribbled over and over again on a sheet of paper? Poirot finds himself plunged into a world of international intrigue, risking his life to uncover the truth about ‘Number Four’.
: Among the towering red cliffs of Petra, like some monstrous swollen Buddha, sat the corpse of Mrs Boynton. A tiny puncture mark on her wrist was the only sign of the fatal injection that had killed her.