Closed Casket

Lady Athelinda Playford has invited guests to a house party at her mansion in Clonakilty, County Cork, and it is no ordinary gathering. As the guests arrive, she calls in her lawyer to change her will, and she plans to announce the change at dinner that night. She has decided to leave her two children nothing and give her fortune to someone who has only weeks to live. Two of the guests are men she has never met: the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard. Neither knows why he was asked to come. Then Poirot begins to suspect that Lady Playford expects a murderer to strike, and he wonders why she seems so set on provoking someone who may be a killer. The crime happens despite everything Poirot does to prevent it, and the victim is not the person he expected. He must now find the culprit and solve the case. Sophie Hannah wrote this as the second fully authorised Poirot novel, commissioned by Agatha Christie Limited to mark a hundred years since Christie created her detective.