Endless Night

Endless Night is the Agatha Christie novel that does not get talked about enough, and it is one of her three or four best. Published in 1967 when Christie was 77, the book is told in first person by Michael Rogers, a young working-class drifter who falls in love with an American heiress named Ellie. They build a house on a piece of cursed land in the English countryside. Something is going to go wrong.

Christie's narrative trick here is the same one she used in the Roger Ackroyd novel forty years earlier, and it works because Michael's voice is the engine of the book. He is charming and observant and, in places, deeply unsettling in ways that are easy to miss on a first read. The country house, the gypsy curse, the local opposition to the building project, all build a particular kind of pastoral dread that Christie had not written quite like before.

Five stars. One of Christie's genuinely modern novels and one that the readers who love her early puzzles often overlook. Recommended even to readers who think they know what Christie can do.