onnurtilraun

Even if I joined in pretty late in the game, the three weeks during which I managed to follow the Reading Away the Pandemic Buddy Read were a fun experience. I've done some Buddy Reads with other people in read life, but never online, and it went better than I would have imagined.

The only thing I regret was that I wish I had been more active, but the fact I'm a bit of a slow reader and real life issues didn't really help; while I finished "Tenant for death" in time, it took me a bit longer to get through "The daughter of time" and "Cat among the pigeons". Not that it was that huge an problem, since that way I did manage to enjoy them with more calm - as I said in another post, I have the bad habit of rushing through the last few pages of a book.

The BR was also a new experience for me in another way: I'm the kind of person who prefers watching my cozy mysteries in movies and TV shows, rather than reading them, so this was an interesting change of pace for me. All in all it was a very fun experience that I'll definitely try again, though hopefully at a time when I'll have fewer things to deal with, so that I can fully concentrate on it.

Now, on to the book itself, Agatha Christie's "Cat among the pigeons". While I'm familiar with Poirot and the general concepts and atmosphere of her works, especially those with Poirot, I haven't read much written by her - I remember reading a couple of her books as a kid, during the summer holidays, but I don't have a clear memory of them.

All in all, I found the book very enjoyable, even though it I didn't find it as good as the other two we went through during the buddy read. Solid mystery, even if some of the details and twists were predictable. I didn't mind Poirot entering the story that late, since it gave time to build up a very interesting background, and the international intrigue angle was very well done.

That said, I found the pacing really sluggish at points, and like I mentioned above some elements were easy to predict, which didn't fully pull me in. For me, this was the least interesting of the three books I've read - but it wasn't a bad book, at all.

Fun fact: the official title of the Italian translation of this book is "Gruesome quiz". Weird choice.