Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie

I read this book at Christmas :-D Perfect, isn't it? It's a great book, I love it :-) Beautiful. There's Poirot, or course, there's a murder on Christmas' Eve, a family full of suspects and all the clues laid out for us, nothing is hidden, everything is in plain sight, we could say. Very very interesting and well written, I love it.
It starts introducing all the family to us. Old, selfish, proud, rough, rich Simeon Lee who wants to have his family reunited for Christmas. Devoted and therefore enslaved son Alfred and his wife Lydia, living in his same house. Sensitive, rancorous David, always reliving the past and hating the father that caused so much pain to his beloved mother, and his loving wife Hilda. Politician George, cheap and greedy, and his young "shopaholic" wife Magdalene, both living on what his father gives him every month. Harry, the black sheep of the family, coming to make peace. Maybe.
Pilar Estravados, only daughter of Simeon's daughter Jennifer, now an orphan, so she comes from spain to know them and live with her English family. Stephen Farr, only son of Simeon's old business partner from South Africa, invited to stay over Christmas. Poirot is a guest at Colonel Johnson's house and when Simeon's killed, they both come to join Superintendent Sudgen with the investigations. It all follows the best of traditions: first the three investigators interview all the people involved, meaning the family plus Simeon's misterious personal valet and his good old butler Tressilian, that I liked very much. Second, they spend two days taking separate paths, during which time Poirot talks to everyone, chatting with them. The 27 is the day of revelations, when Poirot explains everything. I really loved this book because it's all there, all Poirot knows or sees, we know it too, everything is shown to us. It's not at all impossible to get to the truth, on the contrary, since we can't really "see" the characters of a book, some things are even too clear from the way they're explained. I totally failed to notice Pilar's secret, and guessed it only when she cried "they want to give the money to me, to me! It's not fair" or something like this. Only then and not a second before because I'm very bad with faces and my memory is awful so I could not remember who was tall, who had blue eyes, who had moustaches or not, and things like that. Well, I knew Poirot and Sudgen both had moustaches because they talked about it, comparing them, kinda, but simple phisical descriptions rarely stick to my mind. About the men's secret, I was absolutely sure about Stephen's, but I only had a vague feeling about the other one, I just couldn't put my finger on it yet, until it was too late :-)
Agatha Christie has always been my favourite crime-novelist and always will be. :-)

ITA il natale di Poirot