Book review: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2017 was Agatha Christie's classic Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery.  Poirot, the famous detective, is on the train when one of the passengers is found murdered in his berth.  The train is delayed in the middle of nowhere by a snow drift, so Poirot has nothing to do but determine which of his fellow passengers is the murderer.

For what must be a bloody crime scene, Christie's novel is entirely bloodless.  The victim has no redeeming qualities and the motivation for killing him is judged not only by the reader but by Poirot himself as just and undeserving of punishment. The planning that went into the crime has more moving pieces than a Rube Goldberg machine, and it beggars belief that the execution went off (almost) without a flaw.