Murder on the Orient Express

I had an interesting experience with this book because I've been meaning to read it for a long time and didn't know much about the plot besides the setup... until just a few months ago where the whodunnit was casually spoiled for me in a Reddit comment or something like that. Which was a number, but reading through this was fun in the same way as rereading a mystery and looking to see where the clues for, which is something I rarely do.

I'm going to keep this next part vague as to not spoil anything, but when I got to the end I realized that there was an aspect to the spoiler I read that wasn't made clear to me, so the reveal still kind of caught me by surprise, which was neat.

Anyways, I really enjoyed this overall. The writing is really sharp, especially the characterizations, though that may be in big part due to the excellent narration by David Suchet in the audiobook I listened to. Every character has a unique voice and is just fun to spend time with. There's definitely some dated racial and sexist profiling going on in some of the theories, but the book was written in 1934 so it's easier to forgive.

At times the story just feels like a full length riddle or something, most of it consists of interviews with the suspects after the murder had taken place. There is very little action happening or anything like that, it's all just deduction. It's still very entertaining and is clearly an early mould of those types of riddles and stories that have come since.

I'll have to check out some more of Agatha Christie's work soon.