HERCULE POIROT'S SILENT NIGHT

Belgium’s enduring gift to the annals of detection travels to Norfolk to solve a murder case that grows more and more vexing.

Arnold Laurier, the math teacher who’s inherited Frellingsloe House, is dying. But before he goes, his wife, Vivienne, has two wishes she conveys to her best friend, Cynthia Catchpool: She’d like Poirot to visit Arnold, who’s long idolized him, for Christmas week 1931, and she’d like him to figure out who killed inoffensive Stanley Niven, a patient in St. Walstan’s Cottage Hospital, before Arnold takes up residence in the hospital room next door. Poirot agrees to make the trip, and his amanuensis, Scotland Yard Inspector Edward Catchpool, is so devoted to him that he tags along even though it means spending a week with his long-estranged mother, by far the most amusing character here. The timing of Niven’s fatal bashing identifies the principal suspects as Arnold’s closest relatives: his wife; his sons, Douglas and Jonathan; and their wives, Madeline and Janet. The main reason that Arnold doesn’t want Poirot to solve the mystery, however, is not that he’s unwilling to implicate his loved ones but that he wants the glory of solving it himself, even if the cost is his own life. Hannah paints such a suffocating picture of Christmas at Frellingsloe House that Poirot’s inquiries among the staff at St. Walstan’s come as a relief. When the inevitable second murder takes place on Poirot’s watch, he applies the principle of “now that it’s there” that Catchpool has proposed in a quite different context to unpack the well-nigh undetectable motive for both murders.

A fiendishly inventive serving of humble pie, or Christmas pudding, for puzzle-solvers who think they’re clever.