Peril at End House, by Agatha Christie

In Peril at End House, Hercule Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings try to prevent the murder of a young woman, Nick Buckley, who has recently experienced three close calls that were interpreted as accidents. When they meet her, she waves off what she thinks is a wasp, but Poirot determines that it was a bullet that went through the brim of her cap. To protect Nick, they inspect the sites of previous accidents and caution her to be careful, but in a case of mistaken identity, Nick's cousin Maggie is murdered in her stead. Poirot hides Nick away in a nursing home for her own protection, but even there she nearly dies from poisoning. Eventually, Poirot divines what's really going on at End House, but what I found interesting about this novel is that he is tripped up over and over again and truly doubts his own abilities, something that I haven't seen in the earlier books. This one also included several antisemitic comments that really stand out today.  I  enjoyed this book, although I missed the supremely confident Poirot I'd become used to, and I would say that it's not one of Christie's better books.
 

Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

 

I really enjoyed this novel about a young woman, Adina, who believes that she is an alien sent to earth to gather information about humans and share it with her superiors whose own planet is becoming unlivable and who have to relocate. She uses a fax machine to communicate with them, and they also appear in her dreams at night. She comes out as an alien to friends and family, then the world when her closest friend convinces her to publish her observations as a book which becomes very popular and makes her a literary sensation. When Adina's dog dies unexpectedly and she loses her best friend to cancer, she spirals into a depression that takes her a long time to recover from. Her boyfriend had already left her and her superiors stopped communicating with her, leaving her adrift. The novel follows her from childhood through her 40s, all the while documenting her deadpan reflections on human society. She takes a similar approach to all aspects of her life leading me to wonder if she is actually a neurodivergent or schizophrenic person who has simply fantasized her alien experiences. The final communications from her superiors and the book's conclusion leave everything up in the air, providing a lot of food for thought.

The Sittaford mystery, by Agatha Christie

 

The Sittaford Mystery is a standalone story that doesn't include any of Agatha Christie's usual detectives. After a séance in which the message is received that Captain Trevelyan has been murdered in his cottage six miles away, Major Burnaby walks to the cottage only to find that Captain Trevelyan has indeed been murdered. Trevelyan's nephew James, who visited him that afternoon, is arrested for the murder, but James' fiancée, Emily, is unwilling to accept his guilt and travels to the village to ferret out the true murderer. The six people who attended the séance seem innocent by default, but could one of them have had preknowledge of the crime? What about Trevelyan's sister, niece, and other nephew? Or his assistant and his new wife, of whom Trevelyan didn't approve? Emily teams up with a reporter, Charles Enderby, to investigate other potential suspects, and both work occasionally with Inspector Narracott who also shares information with them, eventually leading up to a surprising but satisfying conclusion.

Fencing with the king, by Diana Abu-Jaber

 

I enjoyed this novel set in 1995 Jordan about a 30-something woman traveling with her father to visit his family in Amman, Jordan. Amani is a professor and poet who has been at loose ends since her divorce. When her father, Gabe, is invited to go to Jordan for King Hussein's 60th birthday, he's reluctant, but she persuades him to go. Amani has found scraps of a letter that Gabe's Palestinian refugee mother left in a book for him, she's intrigued by what seems to be a mystery of a missing person; clues about a castle and cemetery are all she has to go on to find him. Once in Jordan, Amani and her father are caught up in their extended family, including Gabe's two brothers and Amani's cousin Omar, who squires Amani around Jordan trying to find the castle and cemetery from the letter. Eventually they track down the missing boy, now a man in his 60s, but they still don't have all the pieces of his story. Told from alternating viewpoints of both Amani and her uncle Hafez, Amani learns what happened in the past and, with her father and Omar, rights the wrongs committed so many years ago. In addition to family, Amani meets a handsome fencing instructor, and a romance slowly develops between the two, although this plot line takes a definite back seat to the family drama and historical setting. Like Amani, author Diana Abu-Jaber is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and American descent. She has written five novels, two memoirs, and a YA novel, many of which reflect themes about Arab-American culture.

The babes in the wood, by Ruth Rendell

Inspector Wexford and his partner are drawn into the investigation of a potential kidnapping of two teenagers and their babysitter. Initially uncertain whether any crime has been committed, Wexford nevertheless does due diligence and follows up on a variety of leads to find out what happened to them. Talking to the people who were close to the babysitter, Wexford gets conflicting impressions of her character and slowly begins to put together possible scenarios that would explain the disappearances. After a body is found in the woods, he is able to narrow down the possibilities to identify what happened. So far, I've only read Ruth Rendell standalone mysteries and novels, some of which I've liked but others less so. This is the 19th book in the Inspector Wexford series, but the first one I've read. I enjoyed it quite a lot, so I'm going to tackle the list starting with the first.