Cards On The Table

Four suspects, four investigators and a host murdered in the same room while a game of bridge is under way: the premise of Cards On The Table is unusually exposed for a Christie mystery. With everyone present accounted for, the case has to run on psychology rather than alibis, and Poirot reads the bridge scorecards as evidence of temperament. Christie narrows the field in the first chapter and then makes that narrowness the difficulty, since each of the four has done this before and none has ever been charged. The result is one of her most structurally confident puzzles. Things worth knowing: • A closed-circle mystery with only four possible culprits • Card play used as a window into character and method • Poirot working alongside other investigators rather than alone • Harper Collins paperback in the standard Christie livery Ideal for puzzle-minded mystery readers, published by Harper Collins and available at Boipoka.