An omnibus volume consisting of four Hercule Poirot novels:

Murder for Christmas: A nasty old man gathers various family members -- some long-lost or estranged -- together for Christmas, messes with their minds concerning their inheritance, and then turns up dead in a spectacularly bloody fashion.

Honestly, I didn't think this one was very well-written. There's way, way too much of people awkwardly explaining things they already ought to know to each other. And most of the characters are awful in ways that I think probably seem worse to modern readers than they would have at the time, particularly when it comes to their attitudes towards women. But the plot was entertaining enough, with some ridiculous but kind of fun twists.

The Hollow: Now, this one was very well-written! And the characterization is wonderful, with a cast of complex, strange, and interesting people. Honestly, I think I could have happily read an entire novel just about these folks and their weird love polygons, even without the mystery. Which may be just as well, as it actually takes quite a while for the murder to happen. But, once it does, it also turns out to be interesting, with a solution I genuinely didn't expect, but which made perfect sense in retrospect.

You know, from the handful of Agatha Christie novels I'd read so far, I have to say that I never entirely understood her reputation. Her stuff always seemed to me, at its best, to be clever in a reasonably diverting sort of way, but hardly a shining beacon of brilliance. With this one, though, I feel like I'm beginning to understand the acclaim. Which is odd, because this isn't one I'd ever even heard of before, let alone seen touted as one of her best.

Murder in Retrospect: In this one, Poroit is engaged to re-examine a murder that happened sixteen years ago, because the convicted murderer's daughter is convinced she was actually innocent, and is looking for the real truth.

This was another really good one. I'm seeing an entertaining pattern with these, where I'm quite convinced I've figured out whodunnit and why, and it turns out I'm almost right, but there's an extra layer on top of that which ends up meaning that I wasn't actually right, after all. And that's done really well here.

Thirteen at Dinner: I ended up skipping this one, because it turned out I'd already read it before, in a different omnibus volume. I vaguely remember thinking it was all right, but it obviously wasn't terribly memorable, and I wasn't feeling any great inclination to re-read it.

Rating: I'm not sure I can give an accurate rating to this one, given how I skipped the fourth novel, but I'm going to call it 4/5, anyway, based almost entirely on the strength of the middle two. ( )