Ordeal By Innocence by Agatha Christie – #ABookADayInMay – Day 28

I read all of Ordeal By Innocence (1958) on a long coach journey, and what better way to make the hours go by than with Agatha? I didn’t know anything about this Christie, nor had I seen the TV adaptation from a few years ago, so it was quite fun to go in totally blind. It opens with a man called Arthur Calgary going to visit a family in a house called Sunny Point (though built on land traditionally called Viper’s Point). He has a strange mission. He has come to tell them that Jack, one of the sons of the house, is not a murderer. He is just a couple of year’s late. There is some convoluted backstory that we can swallow in order to get on with the story. Essentially, Calgary could have given Jack an alibi for a murder he was jailed for – and where he died of pneumonia, a few months into his sentence. The murder? Jack’s mother, blugeoned to death in her study. Calgary thinks he is bringing good news by clearing Jack’s name – but really he has thrown the cat among the pigeons. Now they…