Fiction

Arthur C. Doyle intended this 1893 collection of stories to be the last of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. The thrilling collection starts off with ‘The Adventure of the Silver Blade’, where Holmes investigates the disappearance of a race horse and a murder. It is followed by ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’, Doyle’s remarkable attempt at infusing sentiment and discrimination issues in the otherwise pragmatic, logic-induced tales of Holmes and Watson. In ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’, an apparent case of burglary links to a murder. Doyle reveals the great trust between Watson and Holmes as the latter depends on his friend’s timely intervention to save him. After similarly exciting stories, Doyle ends the collection by presenting Sherlock’s greatest nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in the shocker, ‘The Final Problem’. Intended as the last case of Sherlock, it depicts fatal consequences as the extraordinary detective strives to defeat the crafty mastermind.

From the moment Lucy met her husband’s mother, she knew she wasn’t the wife Diana had envisioned for her perfect son. Exquisitely polite, friendly, and always generous, Diana nonetheless kept Lucy at arm’s length despite her desperate attempts to win her over. And as a pillar in the community, an advocate for female refugees, and a woman happily married for decades, no one had a bad word to say about Diana…except Lucy.

That was five years ago.

Now, Diana is dead, a suicide note found near her body claiming that she longer wanted to live because of the cancer wreaking havoc inside her body.

But the autopsy finds no cancer.

It does find traces of poison, and evidence of suffocation.

Who could possibly want Diana dead? Why was her will changed at the eleventh hour to disinherit both of her children, and their spouses? And what does it mean that Lucy isn’t exactly sad she’s gone?

Hercule Poirot returns home after an agreeable luncheon to find an angry woman waiting to berate him outside his front door. Her name is Sylvia Rule, and she demands to know why Poirot has accused her of the murder of Barnabas Pandy, a man she has neither heard of nor ever met. She is furious to be so accused, and deeply shocked. Poirot is equally shocked, because he too has never heard of any Barnabas Pandy, and he certainly did not send the letter in question. He cannot convince Sylvia Rule of his innocence, however, and she marches away in a rage.

Shaken, Poirot goes inside, only to find that he has a visitor waiting for him — a man called John McCrodden who also claims also to have received a letter from Poirot that morning, accusing him of the murder of Barnabas Pandy…

Poirot wonders how many more letters of this sort have been sent in his name. Who sent them, and why? More importantly, who is Barnabas Pandy, is he dead, and, if so, was he murdered? And can Poirot find out the answers without putting more lives in danger?