Just Finished Reading The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie

Mild-mannered, psychologically-perceptive Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is the featured sleuth in the Agatha Christie novel I just read, The Mystery of the Blue Train, from 1928.  It involves the mystery of the strangulation murder of young Ruth Ketterling, a rich American heiress, on the French Blue Train while destined for the country's southeastern Riviera.  Aside from Poirot, who conveniently happened to be one of the train's passengers at the time of the crime, the main character is Katherine Grey, a young level-headed Englishwoman who has just inherited a tidy sum of money from an elderly woman for whom she had been a caretaker for several years.  Poirot enlists Katherine's help in solving the case, a mystery I had partially figured out early on in the story.  After all, I do like puzzles like Sudoku, Kakuro, Crosswords, Wordscapes, etc,, and once I know the game's pattern I can better infer the solutions.  Mystery stories are like puzzles, with their own pattern: it's important to introduce the culprit early on while highlighting a number of obviously suspicious characters to distract the reader...but since I'm "hip" to the author's strategy I tend to dismiss the early suspects outright.  Also, the mystery writer will often insert a seemingly irrelevant bit of information that doesn't seem to fit the ongoing flow of the story, and that worked for me as well here when the revelation that the victim's personal maid had disembarked in Paris struck me as being a bit random...

Aside from Katherine Grey, I thought that Derek Ketterling, the victim's estranged husband and a prime suspect, was the most interesting character as he was sympathetic and candid about himself and his admittedly heavily flawed lifestyle of gambling and hedonism.  I think you'll like this story if you're into mystery fiction...I found it to be one of Agatha Christie's better stories that I've read so far...