I’m being harsher on this book because it’s been very Miss lately with the latter part of the Poirot books.
The plot was predictable, the social commentary on how the youth is going to shit and especially the talk about young girls being foolish and not being controlled enough was boring and yuck. The witness bias talk was interesting but the plot and killers were predictable, the romance was out of nowhere and annoying. And idk David being the typical scoundrel was boring. The interactions we had with the characters and Poirot were few and far between, and the majority of the book was Poirot being stumped at solving the mystery which was out of character since this was so simple to solve, and he just didn’t make the enquiries he usually does in other books, for the sake of this story to exist. I do love the dynamic between Ariadne Oliver and Poirot though, especially Ariadne’s sleuthing. I wish she wrote more books with this duo.