After the not-so-good attempt at thriller in The Big Four, the Poirot series returns to form with The Mystery of the Blue Train.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. It's not considered one of Agatha Christie's best books. In fact, some consider it among the worst, but I found a lot to like. This is one of those Poirot mysteries where the emphasis is not on the great detective's investigation, but on the characters. Poirot does not even appear until we are almost 100 pages in.

Christie does not dazzle us with one of her most fiendishly clever plots, with lots of red herrings, but there is enough of that and for me the culprit came suitably as a surprise. This writer has a way of surprising me with the final revelation but at the same time making me realize that a lot of little unexplained things suddenly make sense. She is good that way.

She is also good with the characterization. I think her reputation for not being good with characters is undeserved. Yes, in general her best quality is the plot, and it's not like she aspires to win the Nobel prize or anything, but the characters rang true and I felt as if I knew them.

Good effort. ( )

Overall, a good mystery but I think I was supposed to like Derek Kettering and to me he came across as a Slime who would easily get bored. ( )

After I read this, I found out that this was apparently Agatha Christie's least favourite Poirot story. While I personally think that her worst Poirot is 'The Clocks' I have to agree that this is not a good book. In fact, it's actively bad. There isn't anything that draws you in to the story and while I actually liked the revelation of the murderer, that was the only thing that I liked and it's not enough to make me like the rest of the book any better. Also, there had to be a better way to let Katherine figure out who the murderer is, because this was just plain dumb. ( )

Somehow I don't remember reading this Hercule Poirot, but I'm sure that I must have because when I was working my way through Agatha Christie's extensive backlist, I thought that I hadn't missed any Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. This one is one of the earlier Hercule Poirot's, but it has all the trademarks of an Agatha Christies mystery. There are plenty of red herrings, and plenty of suspicious people, and a highly intelligent female. but Hercule Poirot manages to disentangle all the intricate steps of this planned murder of an American millionaire's only daughter who was found murdered on a train to Nice, It is made to look like a simple robbery- murder, but Hercule determines that there is much more than that to this cruel murder. I must be honest and say that I didn't figure out the whole story behind the murder, but I did correctly identify in my mind one of the perpetrators. This was an enjoyable listen, and Hugh Fraser does an excellent job of narrating the story. I must admit that I'm enjoying re-visiting these Agatha Christie books by audiobook. It opens up a whole new dimension. ( )

This started off a little slow, and introduced a lot of characters; it was hard to keep track of them at first. Also, the point of view kept shifting, and we didn't actually see much of Poirot.

The second half picked up a bit, and I didn't completely solve the mystery, so it was a solid read, overall.

However, it did contain some profanity, including God's name used as an exclamation. ( )