The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the sixth of Agatha Christie‘s Hercule Poirot novels. In this one, Poirot has given up solving murders and retired to the countryside, totally unaware of how many novels were yet to come… Since there were already several Poirot novels out, most readers would have gone into this one with some expectations of how the story would play out: Poirot would make some cryptic remarks about an odd detail and using one’s little gray cells, and would finally gather everyone into the drawing room for a big reveal of the guilty party. Look, I’m not knocking the formula, I really like it! These are some of my favorite books! But I like even more when Christie uses those expectations and plays with them.

In the beginning of the book, a widow named Mrs. Ferrars...

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