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The Killings at Kingfisher Hill

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Member Reviews

I love all of the original Poirot stories by Agatha Christie and I truly do believe that this book felt very similar in style and tone. The mystery itself was also one that I thoroughly enjoyed.
The Killings at Kingfisher Hill was the first of the New Hercule Poirot Mysteries that I have read, and although I went in a little dubious, I was pleasantly surprised.

The voice given to Poirot by Sophie Hannah is her own, but you can feel the essence of the beloved Belgian Detective in every word and gesture.
The only small downside for me was the narrator, Catchpool, as I found him a very confusing mind to keep up with. I kept having to go back pages to make sure that I had read the previous paragraphs correctly as he changed his inner narrative more than once. Which I understand as he’s an unreliable narrator, but for me, it got a little tiresome.

Thank you to HarperCollins and NetGalley for the ARC copy they provided in exchange for an honest review.

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Poirot is on his way to investigate the death of Frank Devonport at the behest of Richard Devonport. He is travelling with his companion and police detective, who is a really good sidekick by the way. Their attention is drawn by the antics of a young woman who seems particularly distressed and also convinced that someone is intent on killing her.

Her behaviour and insistence on swapping seats sets a series of events in motion that garners Poirot's attention and gets the little grey cells bouncing, however he isn't quite prepared for the surprises awaiting him at the esteemed Kingfisher Hill residence. A mystery on the way to solve a mystery - only Poirot can find himself in such a complex situation.

I have to say the more Hannah writes Poirot the more her voice sounds like Christie. Listening to the audiobook actually gives the listener or reader a better feel for said voice, because the narrator has the characters down to a fine art, especially Poirot. Julian Rhind-Tutt is an excellent choice.

I look forward to reading the next in the series and can only hope that eventually someone will revive the series in film or tv format featuring the stories of Christie's famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot with Hannah at the helm of the ship. I miss Suchet and this gives me Suchet-Poirot vibes.

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Another fabulous tale from Sophie Hannah with Poirot and Catchpool.

The plot was well written and followed the Christie pattern for her mysteries - I love the mystery, the setting, and the dislikeable characters as this adds to the Christie-esqueness of the story. Hannah is amazing in her own right though! Looking forward to the next installment.

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A delightful Hercule Poirot whodunnit by Sophie Hannah which in keeping with the Agatha Christie versions I didn't guess the murderer! A brilliant cast of characters with a rapidly developing plot. A very entertaining read.

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After reading the absolute train wreck that was the Monogram Murders, I just can't in good conscience give a fair review on this one. Better just to stick with good old Agatha!

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I love Agatha Christie books and also Sophie Hannah books and this was not a let down. I am glad that Poiroit and Catchpool managed to solve it in the end. If you are a fan then I recommend this book

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I love a murder mystery. When Harper Collins sent me a free copy of The Killings At Kingfisher Hill by Sophie Hannah in exchange for a review it was like music to my ears. Before picking up this novel, I had no idea that thriller writer Hannah had reprised the iconic Agatha Christie character, Belgian hero Hercule Poirot. Four books in, however, it seems Hannah is still extremely comfortable in her role.

Without giving any part of the plot away, The Killings At Kingfisher Hill is, on the first thumb, slightly complex and clunky to first engage with. While its writing style is engaging, the main story itself is difficult to establish due to the many sub-plots and characters. Despite this, however, Hannah manages to create a middle-class mystery worthy of its place in the Agatha Christie estate. A labyrinth of possibilities, I found this novel worth the uphill struggle it first presents.

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Just didn't feel like Poirot to me and certainly didn't feel like Miss Christie at all. However I found that satisfying in a way because it reinforced my innate prejudice towards these posthumous revivals. I daresay a lot of folk will read it . But to me it feels a bit cheap and nasty.

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I'm a bit torn about this one. I always enjoy Hercule Poirot, and I do think Sophie Hannah has captured his distinct manner and way of investigating. I think for this installment of the new Poirot stories it was the mystery itself that just fell a bit... flat. Things that were being hyped as being mysterious and impossible in the end had very basic and mundane explanations, and I felt that we ended up in almost exactly the same place at the end of the book as we were at the start. I am still interested in picking up new Poirot's, as I did enjoy Hannah's previous stories featuring the detective.

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Really great read and brings the life of Poriot to life once again! great work from Sophie, and kept me guessing all the way until the end. So glad that she is bringing back this classic character to books again.

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A new Poirot mystery. Poirot and inspector Catchpool embark on a journey to the Kingfisher estate to solve a murder no one really knows about or wants to talk about. They face lies, hatred and peculiar happenings along their investigation but in the end they do catch the right killer.

I’m a huge fan of Agatha Christie and of Hercule Poirot so I was super excited to read this book and it did not disappoint. From start to finish this book kept me guessing and wondering and I in the end I was truly surprised.

The characters are very Christie like I think, and I quite like them. I also like that the book is told in the perspective of Catchpool. The story plot is interesting and like I said it kept me guessing until the end and still surprised me. I was so sure I knew the killer, but I was wrong.

All in all, this is a great mystery and I cannot wait to read more books in this series.

*ARC received from the publisher via NetGalley

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Hercule Poirot and Inspector Catchpool are sent to Kingfisher Hill to investigate if the person obtained for the murder of Frank Devonport did actually commit the crime as there is now another person also confessing.
On the luxury carriage they are alarmed to encounter a strangely behaved lady who is terrified and tells them a alarming story.
Sophie Hannah is the perfect author to pay homage to Christie. She includes detail, atmospheric surroundings and settings and maintains the detailed plotting with the odd clues, as the the reader you try to work it all out alongside Poirot.
A clever storyline with injected humour.
A story I would recommend to any Christie fans.
My thanks go to the author, publisher and Netgalley in providing this arc in return for a honest review.

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My first Agatha Christie series by Sophie Hannah, and it definitely won’t be my last. Intrigue and pace, a murderous story within a tight knit group of people. An idyllic setting disturbed by lies, but who is telling them? Characters concealed, motives mysterious.

This murder mystery is a quick read that you will struggle to put down. I did not predict the ending,
and the intricacies of the plot were handled with finesse. I cannot wait to read another!

This would be a great wider reading book for students that study An Inspector Coll’s at GCSE to look at the line of enquiry and the role of an investigator/inspector.

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As I stated in my review of The Mystery of Three Quarters, I was fully prepared to hate Sophie Hannah's take on Poirot. As a long term Agatha Christie fan, I honestly just didn't think that anyone would be able to get the tone of these stories right. However, I have to concede that Sophie nails it. These stories aren't parroted copies of Christie's work (and nor should they be) but they do feel like a natural continuation of Poirot's character (admittedly with some modern twists). The mysteries themselves have all been good too, and I found this one to be no exception. I always look forward to these books coming out

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This is the first time I have given a mixed review of a book on netgalley as I have always been fortunate enough to have unreservedly enjoyed the books I am reviewing. However, I didn’t enjoy reading this book - I have read the previous 3 in the Poirot series and whilst I had some reservations, I felt they were worth reading. As a devoted Christie fan I knew my expectations were possibly too high, I wanted to give the author a fair chance to fill sizeable shoes and I really wanted to like the series as having reread all of Christie’s books about 4 or 5 times I would welcome getting another chance to see Poirot in new settings but this book just disappointed. Apart from Poirot’s green eyes glowing emerald as the answers to the puzzle click into place and reference to the little grey cells which even non Christie fans would be familiar with - the essence of Poirot as an individual is missing.

Catchpool is irritating and implausible and the other characters seem one dimensional. Neither Daisy nor Helen ring true and the nicknames applied to Daisy by Poirot and Catchpool seem pointless. The plot is convoluted and unconvincing and I struggled to finish the book.

Aunt Hester was an intriguing character and the concept of Kingfisher Hill was a good one but it didn’t fulfil its potential. I apologise for this negative review which I will not publish online. I am not sure if the etiquette in such a situation is to simply not give feedback but I felt having been given the opportunity to read the book by the publisher that I should fulfil my part of the bargain.

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Another Sophie Hannah book I loved. I love Poirot, so I don't miss these books when they come out. Great plot, characters and such a fun read.

Thanks a lot to the publisher and NG for this copy.

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As good as any Agatha Christie novel if not better. I couldn't wait to get to the end but also didn't want the book to finish. Cannot wait for the next one.

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EXCERPT: 'Hold on,' I said. 'Three mysteries?'

'Oui, mon cher. There is the betrothed of Richard Devonport, Mademoiselle Helen. Did she or did she not kill his brother Frank? If she did not, then why has she confessed? That is Mystery Number One. Then we have Number Two: the strange affair of Joan Blythe who speaks of mysterious warnings of her own future murder and is assuredly deeply afraid of something.'

And Number Three?'

ABOUT THE KILLINGS AT KINGFISHER HILL BY SOPHIE HANNAH: Hercule Poirot is travelling by luxury passenger coach from London to the exclusive Kingfisher Hill estate. Richard Devonport has summoned him to prove that his fiancée, Helen, is innocent of the murder of his brother, Frank. There is one strange condition attached to this request: Poirot must conceal his true reason for being there from the rest of the Devonport family.

On the coach, a distressed woman leaps up, demanding to disembark. She insists that if she stays in her seat, she will be murdered. A seat-swap is arranged, and the rest of the journey passes without incident. But Poirot has a bad feeling about it, and his fears are later confirmed when a body is discovered in the Devonports' home with a note that refers to "the seat that you shouldn’t have sat in."

Could this new murder and the peculiar incident on the coach be clues to solving the mystery of who killed Frank Devonport? And can Poirot find the real murderer in time to save an innocent woman from the gallows?

MY THOUGHTS: Well done Sophie Hannah! I could hear the Belgian detective's voice clearly throughout this book. The plotting is perhaps a little more complex and ingenious than in Christie's works, but that is in no way a criticism.

I was gripped almost from the very start and continued to be so to the very end. Sophie Hannah had me putting my little grey cells to work, not particularly effectively I may add. I thought that I had it all figured out, the who and the motive, reasonably early on, but by three quarters of the way through I knew that I was wrong, unless someone was lying . . . but, unfortunately, in this instance they weren't! In fact, I got a lot of things wrong, but had great fun doing so.

I thought the solution rather ingenious and was satisfied with the way it was all wound up. There are some despicable characters amongst the cast, and some that I grew quite fond of. It matters not in the least that there's very little character development, and that there's a huge amount of dialogue, two things that I normally complain about. It is what it is, and it works.

Hannah has done a great job of carrying on Poirot in almost Christiesque style. It's a marvellous read, and although one of a series, is easily read as a stand-alone. I have another of her Poirot titles that I recently purchased on my shelf, and I will be pulling that out to go on the pile on my bedside table. And I will be purchasing the others. I enjoyed this romp!

⭐⭐⭐⭐.2

#TheKillingsAtKingfisherHill #NetGalley @HarperCollins

THE AUTHOR: 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.
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.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Harper Collins UK, Harper Fiction, via Netgalley for providing a digital ARC of The Killings at Kingfisher Hill by Sophie Hannah for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com

This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and my webpage

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I am a huge Agatha Christie fan and I am tentatively becoming a Big Sophie Hannah fan,

I love Poirot and I love Hannah’s version too. This is a great mystery and left me stumped a few times. As ever Hercule works it out in such an elaborate and elegant way.

This book stays true to the original follies and foibles of an original Poirot story while bringing a unique new mystery.

I loved it

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Hmm .. I was looking forward to this .. I've loved others of Hannah's Poirot novels .. for a long way into this one , the tedium of the detective's questions got me down .. however I've given it a good rating despite that flaw and one other: the utter complexity of plotting and people which lost me at times; ..however the victimized family was very interesting. :the Devenports and their dysfunctional relations with each other .. and a marvellous set of female characters from the sculpture to Jon and then Poirot's companion police man really grabbed me .. I was eager find out who did what to who .. very adept despite initial tedium . Worth varying on which lucky i did.

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