Elephants can remember by Agatha Christie

A very nice book, I like it a lot. Not difficult to understand, a quite easy mystery, at least nowadays after so many mysteries have invaded our libraries and screens. Still, as always it's very well written, there's Poirot in it which is always a plus point from me, and there's also writer Ariadne Oliver: she's always fun and makes me think of Agatha herself so much it's always a pleasure to read about her :-)
The story starts with Mrs Oliver, when a stranger comes to her at a party to ask her a rather odd question: was it Celia's mother who many years ago shot herself after killing her husband or was it her father who shot her and then killed himself? Apparently this Celia Ravenscroft is about to marry Desmond Burton-Cox, this woman's adopted son. Of course her reasons are not noble (protecting her son or stuff like that), but money-related. He's about to inherit a lot of money from his real mother, and she wants to prevent the marriage. Mrs Oliver dislikes her but can't help the curiosity. She talks to Poirot and they start investigating. Many years have passed, but Mrs Oliver knows about elephants having an amazing memory, and she thinks, if elephants can remember maybe some people can too.
She starts 'hunting for elephants', meaning talking to old people she hasn't seen in years, then tells everything to Poirot.
As I said, it's not too difficult once you learn that Mrs Ravenscroft had a twin sister identical to her who was crazy and had spent some time in a mental institute. The sister was not only crazy, but jealous too because she loved Mr Ravenscroft too. At this point it's quite easy to guess the truth, and basically Poirot's challenge is to find proof, but he finds a girl who lived there and knew everything. She never said a word because of a promise to Mr Ravenscroft. She always knew that Mrs Ravenscroft was killed by her sister, but she still loved her poor crazy sister so asked her husband to protect her, she didn't want her locked up. Still, he felt that she was dangerous and could not be let free in the world, so he killed her and then killed himself. It was not a double suicide after all.
Maybe Celia and Desmond will never reveal the truth to the world, but at least now they know.

ITA Gli elefanti hanno buona memoria