Happy New Year

The New Year means new books, new authors, and new reading goals, but also rediscovering and enjoying old favorites. Today I picked up a short little book called Clues to Christie: An Introductory Guide to Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence and all of Agatha Christie's Mysteries. At only 127 pages, that is a lot of ground to cover and indeed it really is an introduction. I didn't learn anything new about Christie, except that she is quite the playwright as well as novelist. So often fans read her books according to the detective that is featured. Here, her novels were presented in this "traditional" manner, but also in different categories. Death by Strangulation: examples include The Clocks, Nemesis, Sleeping Murder; Death by Poison: The Clocks, Five Little Pigs, After the Funeral; Death by Nursery Rhyme: And Then There Were None, By the Pricking of my Thumbs, Five Little Pigs, Hickory Dickory Dock; or Death by the Seven Deadly Sins: The A.B.C. Murders (Pride), Five Little Pigs (anger), At Bertram's Hotel (Gluttony), Evil Under the Sun (lust), A Murder is Announced (envy), A Pocketful of Rye (sloth), and Death on the Nile (greed).