Avengers Assemble

I was just thinking that it's been a year since the last BBC Agatha Christie adaptation (Towards Zero) so I looked up if there's going to be a new one and there is! Endless Night is next, and although it's not one of my favourite books I do like the characters and slow dread of the story, so hopefully that'll be fun and not too twisty different from the book. No release date yet, as far as I can tell.

Netflix had their own adaptation recently-ish too, that was The Seven Dials Mystery which I did watch and it had some actors I really liked, and a Bundle I liked, but overall I was mostly meh about it. Didn't care about secret societies when I read the book, and I still don't care about secret societies now, though I do know a little more about their proliferation during that time and during the colonial era, and its use as a social bonding mechanism and creation of a sense of elitism in the same lines as a religion (us vs. them), which clarified quite a few things to me as someone who lives in a part of the world where such societies are so alien as to be scary and malignant, but it's in believing they're scary and malignant that gives them undue power. Anyway the adaptation was fine, it had some changes, I don't have strong feelings either way.

In reading, I have just finished Death Comes at the End, which I knew was set in Ancient Egypt which is why I didn't pick it up for a while. I think the setting allows the story to be simpler, as in Christie puts more effort in describing the world and the way its people think than in creating an elaborate mystery. But I did enjoy it, and I did have fun that I figured it out early based on the actual clues and psychology of the characters, and it does not detract enjoyment of the book at all.

I also read two Poirot mysteries, one being The Murder on the Links, which was fun! A clue-heavy mystery, and Poirot butts heads with another detective who is more clue-focused. There are two layers to the murder, and I figured out the first one based on the clues, and the layer itself is similar to what went on in Body in the Library. The structure is a little different in a good way, in how Poirot breaks down the logic of the mystery halfway through the book (yay!) to Hastings. The second layer was more opaque but I got enough of a vague picture that the final resolution made me nod like, yes, I buy that. Only for the book to throw ONE MORE dramatic left curve our way, dang. Also, although I was vaguely aware in later books that Hastings is married, I was not prepared for this to be the story where he meets the woman who'll be his wife, and all the shenanigans that happen in that subplot.

The other is Dead Man's Folly, and I enjoy so much when characters spell out midway through the book certain fact-connecting revelations that usually come towards the end. That said, the final reveal kind of pissed me off, and after sleeping on it, I think it's because there was no way for us the reader to make the necessary leaps of logic based on the info we were given. Specifically, that there were two murders instead of three, and that two characters have been lying about their identities through the book, and a third character knew about the lying but kept quiet. Basically I think there were too many moving parts to get some sort of handle on what was going on.