This is unfortunately one of Christie's boring Poirot novels. I don't even really have anything to say about this except that I really didn't like how Poirot handled the reveal and the case in general and also that I think people would have more sympathy and openly grieve for a murdered 13-year-old.
In general, the book gave me the impression that people didn't really care and that includes Poirot, who with his long inaction puts another child in danger. ( )

An Enjoyable Late Hercule Poirot Mystery

When reviewing a work, I ignore other adaptations unless necessary, but here, it is necessary, because the newest editions of this novel have been published under the title A Haunting in Venice rather than its original, Halowe'en Party. This is what's called "cross-marketing" for the 2023 film, but it's silly, because the original has no haunting - not even of the Scooby-Doo variety - and the setting is not Venice. There is, however, a Halowe'en party. There is also at least one murder, which Agatha Christie's iconic detective Hercule Poirot and his sometimes sidekick Ariadne Oliver - whom I greatly prefer to the pale John Watson imitation Arthur Hastings - must solve. Those are the only similarities with the film, which is an otherwise original script inspired solely by the title of the novel, which it doesn't use.

Poirot novels don't need cross-marketing. They're like Snickers bars: Most people have had one before, and the ones who liked their last one will probably like this one, and the ones who didn't much like it before won't much like this one now. To be sure, there are also Snickers connoisseurs who savor and review each bite individually, but for casual fans like me, a Snickers bar is a Snickers bar with very little variation, and it's a reliably enjoyable treat. It's also unlikely Hallowe'en Party would be any reader's first Poirot novel, because even those introduced to the character through the recent film series would presumably start with the far more famous and far more faithfully adapted Murder on the Orient Express (1934) or Death on the Nile (1937) as the film series does.

Connoisseurs may not like this novel as much because it was written and published in 1969, at the end of a decade that saw a general decline in popularity of the prim and proper locked-room British whodunits that were the character's and his creator's natural habitat of their interwar heyday. The series and its characters are showing their age, and frequent references are made to these darned kids today and their pop star fashions and sociopathic serial killers. In this "brave new world," Poirot and Christie with their lists of suspects and murders committed for love and/or money are the literary equivalent of an old pair of slippers, and just as welcome when enjoyed with a pot of hot tea by the fireplace on a cold autumn evening. ( )

Oh my goodness, this was tedious. I've read a fair few Agatha Christie books in my time, though none starring Hercule Poirot, and quite enjoyed them. Not this. Written in the 1960s, it had the usual cosy middle class feel to it- which is fine, that's the genre. Wading through the long conversations which introduced each character became taxing in the extreme. The descriptions of the preparations for a children's party in the village where the story took place were no better. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to go on. The reasons for the murder of a not-much-liked child when finally revealed were flimsy in the extreme, and the back story, involving a long-disappeared au pair who'd apparently fled didn't convince. The cloak and dagger machinations at the end were frankly risible. I was so happy to turn to the very last page and put the book aside. ( )

The idea of killing a child - and killing her in such a way! - gave me the creeps, and the reactions of people to this death were quite horrible - her younger brother shrugs his shoulders and says something like: "Oh, well, who cares", and other people were no better, joyfully claiming that the dead girl was a lier and that they never liked her. That would be enough for me to have a problem with this book, but it was also boring and repetitive, and I was quite relieved when I finished reading it. I didn't enjoy this book. ( )

A thirteen-year-old girl, Joyce Reynolds, is murdered at a Halloween party, drowned in the tub where the partygoers had earlier bobbed for apples, and Hercule Poirot is called in by his friend, crime novelist Ariadne Oliver, who was a guest in the home where the murder occurred. Hours before the party, Joyce made a pronouncement that she had once witnessed a murder; however, all the individuals Poirot interviewed unanimously dismissed her as the teller of tall tales, casting doubt on that revelation as a motive. Despite rather flat characters and snails’ pace plot, I enjoyed the complicated unraveling of the mysterious deaths related to Joyce’s. Not my favorite Christie work. ( )