Spoiler Alarm

Silent Earth, a very good book on the demise of insects worldwide, gives the ending of Murder on the Orient Express.

So if you haven't read either, and want to read both, you might want to read the Christie first. This probably isn't a big problem. I'm probably very rare for an avid reader in not having read much (if any) Christie. And I wasn't planning on changing that.

It is not a spoiler that insects are dying off in ever more worrying amounts, except for things like cockroaches. (Goulson is also worried about slugs, which are not insects, and he has not convinced me to stop fighting them.) Goulson covers many of the ways humans are endangering insect life. He also goes into how much we don't know about how our activities harm insects.

It's a very good book. I can heartily recommend it. Just, if you want to read Murder on the Orient Express, read that first.

I agree it's generally bad manners to give away the solution of a whodunnit, but I think that particular one is a lost cause — especially given the popularity of the various film versions, there can't be many people who care about such things who don't know it. It's become practically a cliché to make that parallel when you want to say they are all guilty!. Roger Ackroyd is another one that often gets used in that kind of way.

Well, somehow I'd missed it until today. I'll probably read it now, just to see how.