Lisa Barger

 “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”

When the vacationing Hercule Poirot overhears a man asking this question of an unseen hotel guest late one evening, he pays it no mind, dismissing it as the kind of fanciful question a novelist or playwright might ask. But Raymond Boynton is no novelist and his target is not some character in a play. No, the person who’s “got to be killed” is his own mother.

The Story In Appointment With Death

While vacationing in Jerusalem, Poirot overhears a man outside his hotel window ask, “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?” He dismisses the conversation as that of a novelist discussing a character in a book or a playwright working on a new stage production. His interest is only piqued days later when he recognizes the voice as that of Raymond Boynton, a young American on vacation with his siblings and step-mother.

But Mrs. Boynton is not an ordinary step-mother. She is a former prison warden who rules her small family with sadistic tyranny. Other guests notice the strange family–including newly minted doctor Sarah King and psychologist Theo Gerard, who discuss the family (and how, possibly, to help them) extensively.

At a camp in Petra, Mrs. Boynton dies from an overdose of heart medication and Poirot is consulted. What he finds is a family of liars desperate to protect one another and a tangle of timelines that can’t possibly work.

My Thoughts On Appointment With Death

This novel really unsettled me. Old Mrs. Boynton is, without a doubt, a psychological and emotional sadist and Christie did an amazing job of charactering her while still keeping the story within the boundaries of a “cozy” mystery. I can only imagine how utterly terrifying Boynton would have felt had Christie been afforded the freedom to really dig into her.

Critics of time were generally positive in their reviews of Appointment With Death but many felt the story fell short of her absolute best. But that is hardly criticism. If I may echo the sentiments of many others, even a not-quite-perfect Christie novel is still a deliciously good time. Despite my having to fight the urge to skim through some of the middle parts of the book, and occasionally feeling that we’d covered certain parts already, this was worthwhile read. It was made even more so by the audiobook performance of Hugh Fraser.

My one big complaint will be a familiar one. Christie’s penchant for pairing off couples is on display yet again. And while it gives most of the remaining characters happy endings, I’m not sure those pairings were entirely successful. One of them left me with a pronounced feeling of ickiness.

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