Summary: The tranquility of a lovely cruise along the Nile is shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway has been shot. She was young, stylish and beautiful, a girl who had everything – until she lost her life.

Who is also on board? Christie’s great detective Hercule Poirot is on holiday. He recalls an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: ‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.’ Despite the exotic setting, nothing is ever quite what it seems…

I finally read one of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels, Death on the Nile. While I had never read the book or watched any of the adaptations, I did play a point and click puzzle game based around it. So, I felt like I *knew* what to expect in the story.

The mystery was a standard one. A rich woman is killed, and it’s revealed that there are a lot of potential suspects. With secrets being revealed left and right, Poirot has to determine what information he can trust, and who is truly innocent. 

However, as is the case with a lot of Christie’s novels, it ran into one of my normal pet peeves in that it had too many characters. While with Murder on the Orient Express, I was able to listen to an audiobook and distinguish the characters based on their voices, I didn’t have the same fortune here. This caused a lot of confusion when I read the name of another character. 

It didn’t help that there were so many side mysteries and characters who would pop up for a page and then disappear only to show up later as a potential suspect in a different mystery. Combine this with the different alias’ or people with similar names, and it’s just a mess.

In the end, I enjoyed reading another classic Christie work, and I’m even more interested to see the different screen adaptations if only to finally be able to put faces to names. After watching those, I’ll come back with a comparison post.

Overall, I gave this book a 3 out of 5.