In this standalone novel, we meet a young British spy who falls in love with an heiress in a British/Greek family, whose grandfather is a restaurant magnate who might also be some kind of power player in Greek politics. They meet, they fall in love, and then are separated by the various fates of war. When Charles see a notice that the grandfather has died, he sends a note to his former love, who contacts him and suggests that she thinks he was actually murdered. Charles agrees to join Sophia at her family home where he finds that everyone is suspicious, no one really has an alibi, they all have a motive, and nothing is quite what it seems.
The novel then progresses through the investigation where Charles in his expertise as a criminologist with connections to the police slowly tries to make sense of the death. All of which only leads to more and more.
You can read or listen to this one and then watch an interestingly shot, but ultimately cartoonishly acted movie on Amazon Prime, if you want. It’s why I read it. But the book is significantly better and actually quite good. For the most part, this is a well written and well rendered book. It has some definitive goofiness in a few ways. For one, there’s a lot of red herring going on here, and there’s a little too much trying to reckon with a changing world. But the lack of a central detective, even if we do have Charles, allows for some of the amatuerishness of the situation to take on a life of its own.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Crooked-House-Agatha-Christie/dp/0062573276/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3ODQ0IIRL62LG&keywords=crooked+house+by+agatha+christie&qid=1550331745&s=gateway&sprefix=crooked+hosue%2Caps%2C392&sr=8-2)
