Hallowe'en Party

Never kill a child or a pet

That's standard advice from the plotting panels at mystery conventions, but if you're Agatha Christie, you can violate that twice in a single novel.  The first victim, Joyce Reynolds, is an unpleasant tween, the sort of girl who borrows adventures she hears and embellishes then when they become her own. Naturally, when she's drowned in the apple-bobbing basin during a community Halloween party, the investigation centers on Joyce's earlier claim of having seen a murder once.  

The problem is, no one can remember a murder. Well, there was that au pair who disappeared a year or so earlier, but she wasn't murdered, was she? Luckily, Ariadne Oliver happened to be at the party (she was visiting a friend, the mother of one of the other tweens at the party), and she calls Hercule Poirot who solves the mystery just in time to save a third child from death. Written in the mid-60s, Hallowe'en Party feels a little more comfortable with the era than Third Girl, largely because "mod" influences are made in passing rather than being a central part of the story. It's a good late Christie, but because it's missing the broad near-misses that evoke the years shortly before I was born, it's not one of my frequent re-reads.

A Case of Spirits

It's been three years since I read one of Peter Lovesy's Sergeant Cribb books. The policeman's adventures are light and diverting, and more interesting as a glimpse into certain aspects of late Victorian life than as straight mysteries. Here, Cribb finds himself immersed in the spiritualism fad because several seance-goers have been burgled while communing with the dead. When an up-and-coming medium dies while in an electrified chair (an instrument to contact the world of the beyond), Cribb and his plodding assistant Constable Thackery change their investigatory focus from burglary to murder. A Case of Spirits is a passable mystery with several amusing character sketches, particularly that of a well-born spinster who turns out to be more important to the plot than one would guess upon first meeting her.