Just finished The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. It was excellent but I have a question about how it all wrapped up.
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Posted Feb 10, 2019, 11:40 AM UTC · edited
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I agree it caught me a little off guard, but i’m not usually into murder mystery books(just read this one based on the presale hype-which was warranted) so i thought i might have missed something. Anyway, long story short. I messaged him on Goodreads about something else in the book, and he wrote me back. So try that!
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I actually just finished this book last week and have been thinking about it a lot since then.
I can see where you think it came out of left field, but, I think that was a bit of the point. There are some Christie novels where you aren't given enough clues, and the solution is not some whodunnit, but howdunnit--in other words, you know the answer is going to be the weirdest, most unlikely murderer, so the twist isn't the who, but the how.
That's where I think this novel went. It got to a point where it came down to "well, the most unlikely person to have killed Evelyn is Evelyn, so how did she do it?" When you then approached it like that, the little details of who Felicity was, why Bishop cared about Anna, etc., fell a little bit better in place.
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That’s a really interesting way to look at it and I suppose it does make some more sense when you look at it that way.
I was under the impression that all of Agatha Christie’s novels were solvable by the reader but guess I was mistaken on that.
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I don't remember it too well but I do know it had something to do with the lady's maid actually being Evelyn? Throughout the book it makes sense that it was something to do with the maid since they were always together and the author made it a point to keep bringing it up but yeah it was a little random.