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"Rosemary, that's for remembrance." - Sparkling Cyanide, p. 37
We have heartily enjoyed spending the month of July reading along with our friends @maidensofmurder over on Instagram! Thank you so much again, Maidens, for this opportunity to enjoy Agatha Christie together!
The Sum of It:
Our story begins with a group of party guests somewhat guiltily remembering a dinner they all attended nearly a year before...one that ended rather deadly...
Rosemary Barton and her older husband, George, had invited a group of pals for a night out on the town. Everyone seemed to be having a great time getting their drinking and dancing on, until Rosemary took a sip of her champagne and promptly dropped dead. The whisper going around was that Rosemary was depressed after a bout of the flu, and so she probably decided a nice evening out with her friends and loved ones was the perfect time to kill herself. Husband George and Sister Iris, obvi pretty torn up, accept the suicide theory, especially when Iris finds a letter Rosemary wrote to her on-the-side Mystery Boyfriend, showing that old Rosemary would not be too happy about the idea of said boyfriend breaking things off.
HOWEVER, things take a turn when George receives an anonymous letter suggesting that Rosemary didn't commit suicide, and that one of their dinner guests actually killed her! What better way to get to the bottom of his wife's death than to throw ANOTHER dinner party at the same restaurant with the same dinner guests and set a trap to catch the killer! Things go horribly wrong yet again when at awkward dinner number two, GEORGE drops dead in the exact same manner as Rosemary! #shockedface #didntseethatcoming. Did he know too much? Was he on the right track of the killer? Was he actually the intended victim the first time around!?
Colonel Race is brought on to the scene to try and puzzle out who keeps killing Bartons. Throw into the mix a lot of rigamarole with inheriting large sums of money, a politically power-hungry couple with some serious secrets, a baddie cousin in the Argentine, and a secretary in love with her boss, and you have one delicious #MYSTERY.
The YOA Treatment:
Overall, we enjoyed this book. It's always a bit of a bummer to read an Agatha book without Poirot or Miss Marple, but Colonel Race does a very decent, albeit rather forgettable, job of solving the crime with the help of Iris's boyfriend, Anthony Browne. Both of us were actually (FOR ONCE!) able to spot the culprit early on due to some pretty hefty page time dedicated to a certain character's feelings. Emily was on the right track from the start with motive, although Audrey had a little harder time working it all out.
One interesting note in this book is the way it builds on Agatha's status as a MAJOR ROMANTIC. So many of the characters are found to be in different stages of falling in love: love at first sight, realizing you loved someone all along, infatuation, pining quietly, etc. Romance often plays some part in Agatha's novels, but this one particularly showcases it in nearly every character. It's understandable why Agatha took time off in her career from writing crime novels to write a short series of romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott.
We discuss more of our #SPOILERS Sparking Cyanide thoughts and feelings over on the @maidensofmurder account, so if you've read this one, be sure to head over and join in!
-A. & E.
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