"Closed Casket" by Sophie Hannah

 A classic country house murder. Poirot and Inspector Catchpool are guests of Lady Playfair on the night that she changes her will ... and someone is murdered. Whodunnit ... and how ... and why?

The characters are hugely eccentric. Lady Playfair writes children's mysteries which all seem to revolve around wordplay. Her secretary is a fantasist (Munchausen syndrome and then some). The butler carries taciturnity to extremes. Her daughter, whose fiance is a hugely wealthy pathologist who can't stop quoting Shakespeare's King John, is convinced that the world is unfair to her. Lady P's son is amiable but dim-witted, his wife is horrid. The policeman are hopeless: the inspector doesn't want to be there; his sergeant agrees with anything anyone says. 

I'm not sure that the presentation of the puzzle was quite fair, given that a key witness statement is changed moments before the killer is unmasked. 

Selected quotes:

• “She smiled at him, and he had the strange sense he always had - as if her eyes had picked him up, turned him around and put him down again.” (Ch 1)
• “He was of medium height and build, with thinning grey hair and lots of creases and lines around his eyes, but nowhere else. The effect was of an old man's eyes inserted into a much younger man's face.” (Ch 2)
• “An amiable if a distant smile - as if he had felt chipper about something once and had been trying ever since to recollect the cause of his good cheer.” (Ch 4)
• “All those children you never had ... Lucky blighters, I should say.” (Ch 7)
• “Up here, the wind hit the skin like something solid and hard.” (Ch 10)
• “If you had said all that in Ancient Greek and jumbled up the word order for good measure, it would have been no more incomprehensible to me.” (Ch 33)

June 2025; 371 pages

First published by Harper Collins in 2016

My paperback edition issued in 2017

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Sophie Hannah has had the blessing of the Agatha Christie estate to write this novel as part of this series:

1. The Monogram Murders (2014)
2. Closed Casket (2016)
3. The Mystery of Three Quarters (2018)
4. The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020)
5. Hercule Poirot's Silent Night (2023)
6. The Last Death of the Year (2025)