Early evening and snow is falling around Sittaford House. A number of the locals are gathered for an evening’s entertainment. The most notable absentee is the owner of the house, Captain Trevelyan, who has let the house to Mrs Willett and her daughter and relocated to Exhampton, some distance away. His name does come up in the evening’s entertainment in the worst possible way – during a bit of fun with a Ouija board, the phrase TREVELYAN DEAD – MURDER is spelled out.

One of the party heads out into the blizzard to try and get to Trevalyan’s house to make sure that he’s okay – but when he gets there two hours later, he and a local constable break in to find Trevelyan dead, his head bashed in. And the time of death seems to coincide with the time that the board predicted his death…

So, a re-read, chosen for Book Club this time, before I start a little project for December. We chose it because we fancied it was about time to take a look at Agatha and, well, there’s snow in this one. It’s an early Christie, predating most of her great works, but it does show her strengths in constructing a puzzle with the clues presented for the reader to follow. Where this doesn’t play to her strengths is that the who, how and why is pretty simple so there’s a whole bucket of red herrings knocking around – some of which are quite interesting, admittedly, but this could have been a short story without losing too much.

It suffered on a re-read, as knowing who the murderer was, I felt that the “filler” was even more noticeable. The sleuth, Emily Trefusis, the fiancée of the prime suspect, is a rather odd character, rather cruelly manipulating a newspaper reporter into helping her investigation. Can’t help but think if Carr had written this, their story would have had a different ending.

It’s still perfectly entertaining though, but…

I mentioned Carr, and I can’t help but make another comparison. There is at least one occasion when Carr all but lies to the reader to misdirect them and there is a brief rather crucial section here where… oh, I can’t really go into details without spoiling things, but the actions of a character do not match what they know. Well, I think it’s a cheat anyway. Oh, and would nobody at the séance spot what happened there? Nobody?

So I’m a bit undecided on this one. When I read it the first time, I thought it flawed but enjoyable. This time, the flaws were more evident and the enjoyment a bit less. Very curious to see what the rest of my book group think…