Lord Edgware Dies by Agatha Christie (1933)

Poirot helps an American actress seek a divorce, but the next morning her husband is found murdered.

Mystery Review: Lord Edgware Dies is the eighth Poirot book (also known as Thirteen at Dinner at one time in the U.S.). Hastings is back from the Argentine to narrate, now adorned by a "toothbrush" moustache Poirot describes as a "horror" and an "atrocity." As usual Hastings gives Poirot too little credit, Poirot gives Hastings none, and at some point Poirot berates himself for his own stupidity. Lord Edgware Dies is a better than average installment, a clever mystery with the usual tempting and efficient characters and posing the question of how someone can be in two places at once. Christie has fun in one exchange as a character says: "Good title that ... Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a bookstall." Christie's casual and nonchalant anti-Semitism has begun to be unbearable. A college thesis could be written about it. Even when she doesn't attribute negative or stereotypical behaviors to her Jewish characters (which she often does), every Jewish character must be identified as such ("now that he mentioned it, I saw the faint traces of Semitic ancestry") for no apparent reason. Ick.  [4★]