The Last Death of the Year by Sophie Hannah is the sixth continuation of Agatha Christie’s beloved Belgian sleuth. Planting us on a glamorous Greek island on New Year’s Eve, 1932 — and opens not with a corpse, but with a cryptic threat that all but dares Poirot to intervene before the clock strikes murder! In classic Christie style, the novel begins through a narrator whose voice is at once eccentric, elegant and a touch unreliable — the kind of narrator who makes you lean in closer because you know absolutely nothing is being told plainly.
Hannah luxuriates in the period excess — the champagne, the silk, the social performance — not merely as décor but as a narrative instrument. The conspicuous wealth and New Year’s rituals sharpen motives, disguise intentions, and give the murder (when it finally lands) the satisfying inevitability of fate.
The first act is intentionally cryptic and slightly uneven, the kind of slow-churning setup Christie purists will recognize — a house of cards being stacked very precisely. By the middle act, however, the book locks in the pacing tightens, the psychological feints multiply, and you find yourself reading faster than your eyes want to move, hunting the truth before Poirot gets there first. The final reveals are not merely clever but earned — the sort of payoff that makes you retroactively admire the misdirection you didn’t notice was happening.
VERDICT
A stylish, faithful, and ultimately compulsive addition to the Poirot after-canon — one that proves Hannah understands not just Christie’s logic, but her timing, her wit, and her pleasure in letting a mystery breathe before it bites.
The Last Death of the Year by Sophie Hannah will be released on
October 28, 2025
