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This novel is set in an exclusive girls' boarding school where the murder of the games mistress begins a chain of events - except that events in a mythical Middle Eastern country are central to the plot. Various characters are not whom they seem. There are niggles within the community of school teachers - mainly stemming from the mooted retirement of Miss Bulstrode who has co-founded the school and up till now run it with amazing success. But things start to go off the rails when first one murder and then another follows on, with their seeds in something that happened in that far off Middle Eastern country. To avoid spoilers, I won't say anything more about the plot.

The book was a pleasant read but not really memorable. The main problem is that it is billed as a Poirot novel and yet he does not appear until page 218, of a 308 page novel. He then sews everything up, quite often off screen - we only hear in the big reveal where he has been going or whom he has been contacting to find out various facts - in what seems to involve leaps of intuition without us being privy to his thought processes. And the way the killer is disclosed - acting completely out of character it seems when we have been led to believe this person is cool, calculating, a seasoned killer and not someone to lose their head - just didn't strike me as convincing. Basically, apart from possession of one of the murder weapons, there seems nothing to tie this person into the killings in the way of evidence and it just seems to me that if they had kept their nerve, they would have had nothing to worry about. At least, that is how it came across.

On a minor note, the cover to this edition is completely wrongfooted - it shows a woman in what is clearly 1920s or at the latest 1930s dress, when the story is set around the time it was published: 1959, 15 years after WWII.

I love the TV series with David Suchet but cannot recall this story and wonder how they rejigged it - because they must have surely, to have made Poirot the important character he should be in the story. So I can only rate this as a 2-star "OK" read.