Varietats: The Mystery Of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah

Returning home after lunch one day, Hercule Poirot finds an angry woman waiting outside his front door. She demands to know why Poirot has sent her a letter accusing her of the murder of Barnabas Pandy, a man she has neither heard of nor ever met.

Poirot has also never heard of a Barnabas Pandy, and has accused nobody of murder. Shaken, he goes inside, only to find that he has a visitor waiting for him — a man 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?

I have to admit I love all the Sophie Hannah books, her books are always suspenseful, complex and full of twists, and let me say that this "new" Poirot will not be different from her other stories.

I used "new" because if you have read before any of the Agatha Christie stories with detective Hercules Poirot you simply will read a new story; he will be stubborn, pompous and totally Belgian, not French, of course! I couldn't find any differences from the new book of Sophie Hannah and the original stories from Agatha Christie!

This story is original and weird since the beginning, a few people had received a letter from the famous detective Hercules Poirot pointing them as the killers of a man that passed away with natural causes (or they thought so). So, when a few of the lucky recipients of the letters confront Hercules Poirot about the letters, he will be totally surprised about them, because he never wrote these letters! So who and which is the objective to point a few killers of a possible murder? And most important, was the man killed or really died from natural causes?

Let me say that you will not have answers for these questions till the last page, because there are so many pieces in this story that you have to finish all the puzzle to see the complete scene. And, let me say that I didn't guess correctly the ending in any of my "possible" endings on my mind!

When I started reading the story I was totally abducted by it, and it remembered me why I just read 2 of the Hercules Poirot stories, really it gets on my nerves! But this is really a good think, it means that Sophie Hannah had done an amazing job recreating this famous detective and all of his eccentricities!

This is a book to fall in love since the first page, an original mystery with some really curious characters and full of secrets and lies, who will not want to dig in "The Monogram Murders"?

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 27 countries. In 2013, her latest novel, The Carrier, won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards. Two of Sophie’s crime novels, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, have been adapted for television and appeared on ITV1 under the series title Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2012. In 2004, Sophie won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story The Octopus Nest, which is now published in her first collection of short stories, The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets.

Sophie has also published five collections of poetry. Her fifth, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 T S Eliot Award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is forty-one and lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, where she is a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College. She is currently working on a new challenge for the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.