You’re right, of course! I overlooked that and thought this was his first ES.
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I enjoyed the story for the most part. The mechanics were neat and while the mystery wasn’t too hard to figur out, it did create some suspense and kept me engaged.
The conclusion however left a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth. I couldn’t fit any of the motivations to my character. They simply would not have participated in such a plan. A pity, since this was really intriguing me from the start. How does my character fit into this? Also my character would easily have dealt with both of them. Why would they let either of those criminals walk away?
The ending sadly puts this story in the lower ranks for me.
I was enjoying this story until the room I need to investigate straight up disappeared. It is nowhere to be found. I’m trapped in the house forever now.
Can you give more detail? I’m sure someone will be able to help.Don’t give up!
I finally managed to finish this one. As others have said, it’s very, very long. Part of my enjoyment of Fallen London is living a daily “life” in the Neath, so I didn’t like being “away from home” for so long.
Of course, many ES take you out of the Neath proper for certain periods, but generally in chunks, not in one long stretch. In part because I didn’t particularly enjoy this one and so was resistant to continuing, it took me nine days in total. (What a difference to the Candlefinder cases, which are all resolutely rooted in the city’s life.)
Agatha Christie is an author who doesn’t play fair with her readers, and for that reason, I have only ever read one of her books and seen a certain long-running play. So if others say this is a good pastiche of her works featuring this detective, I believe them.
Certainly she has form for the kind of plot reversal this one had at the end, with an enormous info dump as we were already pretty much out of the door. For me, this device was not wholly successful, as it seemed to retrospectively wrench the guts out of the entire plot, quite apart from undermining my character’s entire, um, character, with only a single clue in the run-through I had.
I got the dead butler branch, but there was nothing to suggest a different path, except perhaps investigating things in a different order. Towards the end, of course, the decisions were taken out of the player’s hands, and everything ran on rails.
From the nitpicker’s notes:
lull means “calm someone down”, not “to hang loosely” – two instances of that mix-up.
And racked (not wracked) is from the Elizabethans’ favourite human stretching device, the rack. Not connected to wrecks or to bladder-wrack.
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