Title: The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Author: Agatha Christie
Format: Kindle & Audiobook (Whispersync)
Reading Dates: Sep 9 - Sep 26, 2012
Rating: *** 1/2
My first experience with Whispersync, the new bookmark-in-the-cloud service from Amazon and Audible, is complete and my official reaction is -- not bad! The Mysterious Affair at Styles is one of 20 Kindle/Audible combinations that Amazon is giving away for free, so I snapped it up a few weeks ago. I decided to read this one first, because it was only 5 1/2 hours long on Audible. I could read on my Kindle and then turn on Audible when I got in my car and it would ask me if I wanted to go to my furthest read point. I had a little trouble at first getting Audible to sync reliably--sometimes it would ask me to sync and sometimes it wouldn't, but eventually it seemed to get better. Kindle always seemed to be able to keep my place no matter if the last place I read was on Kindle or on Audible.
But even if you don't want to do the Whispersync thing, you should download both versions just to get the Audible version. David Suchet, the actor known for playing Hercule Poirot, narrates Agatha Christie's first Poirot mystery and he does an outstanding job, not just with Poirot's voice, but with all the voices--male and female. This was a really, really well narrated book.
The mystery itself was intriguing, if typical Christie. A houseful of guests are together at Styles, the country home of Mrs.Emily Inglethorpe, when she is found dead. Several of the house guests, including her much younger husband, her stepsons who stand to inherit her fortune, her daughter-in-law, and the mysterious Dr Bauerstein, all have reasons to want her dead, so Poirot is called in to find the murderer. The solution to the mystery is a bit contrived, but satisfying nevertheless. Poirot's uncanny ability to sift through the clues and combine them in ways that mere mortals don't seem able to is always entertaining. A quick, fun read!
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