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| 4 out of 5 stars |
Another very enjoyable Christie novel with yet another wonderful young woman in a starring role. Emily was delightful. Everyone acknowledges that if anyone will sort things out it's Emily.
All the tribute paid to Arthur Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles really appealed to me as well. Beginning the story with a séance, something very dear to ACD, was a great touch. Then the choice of setting, on Dartmoor, plus the mists and the escaped convict emphasized the similarities. Emily gets set up as a female version of Sherlock Holmes with Charles the reporter as her Watson. He is certainly recording her story for posterity. I think someone (the fellow involved in psychic research?) even muses about contacting Conan Doyle with such “good proof" of spiritual contact during the table-turning.
As usual, Christie fooled me with regards to the culprit. She laid excellent red herrings, what with all the South African and Australian connections. She really likes to use us colonials to muddy the waters! But real crimes are most often committed for revenge, love, or greed and this would definitely apply to any of her distracting characters. That lead me down the garden path, easily ignoring that the real criminal shared the same motivations.
If you also enjoyed this novel, you may also like The Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor (which includes Conan Doyle and one of his real researches) or if you like non-fiction, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach which has a good section on Victorian séances.
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