Cat Among the Pigeons

By 1959, Agatha Christie had gotten tired of Hercule Poirot, but her fans hadn't.  One way she balanced her desires against that of her readers was to restrict Poirot to the last few chapters of "his" novels.  Cat Among the Pigeons starts with Ali Yusef, an English-educated Middle Eastern prince trying to escape from a revolution along with his pilot and school friend, Bob Rawlinson.  They die in a sabotage-induced crash, but not before Bob manages to hide Ali's jewels *somewhere* in Bob's sister's luggage.

A few months later, Rawlinson's niece Jennifer enrolls in a girl's school and distinguishes herself in nothing but tennis.  She does, however make friends with Julia, whose mother was in British Intelligence during the war, and it's Julia who contacts Hercule Poirot after a student disappears and a teacher is found murdered. Poirot gets the credit for solving the mystery, but it's really Julia and her mother who figure it out.  I think Cat Among the Pigeons would have been better without Poirot, and would have liked to have seen a bit more of the workings of the school.

Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren't Your Best Source of Health Information

Paul Offit takes a slightly different tack with his latest book, Bad Advice.  He's still crusading against medical quackery and scientific woo, but instead of presenting new cases, he revisits the world of anti-vaxxers and supplement advocates with tips on how to properly argue for science.  There's not much new (other than the news that Andrew Wakefield has been reduced to the conspiracy theorist circuit), but this time Offit explains how he and others have effectively refuted bad science.  Offit also describes some of the dangers (lawsuits, stalking, death threats) that come with fighting for science and against public opinion and has enough of a sense of humor to dissect some of his least successful media appearances - and to admit that the most frightening audience he ever faced was his daughter's 8th grade class.