December 1959
This is Agatha Christie’s sixty-first detective novel, and well up to her standard. This time she has set her scene inside an exclusive girls’ school run by the most enlightened head-mistress and her devoted assistant. The girls range from a Middle-Eastern princess to nice freckled English girls mad keen on tennis, but it is one of these who has the intelligence to understand why there are two murders in the sports pavilion and to go to Hercule Poirot with her discovery. It seems to me that Miss Christie gets steadily better, and when I consider the number of people she ‘has taken out of themselves’ - the people who have said ‘Don’t speak till I’ve finished this’ multiplied sixty-one times by heaven knows how many thousands, I am mathematically moved to admiration, although I suppose M. Poirot would claim most of the credit, as he would never stop to think where he might be without her.