The Murder on the Links (1923) - Written by Agatha Christie, a tale of romance, blackmail, betrayal and murder

The Murder on the Links was a book, written by detective write Agatha Christie, published in 1923, and starring Hercule Poirot and Hastings. The book was like many of Agatha Christie's books, written with the current societal conditions of that time, and with a large number of characters in the book. With these characters and the complexity of the plot, it was hard to make a guess as to who the actual villains are; another notable part of this book was that Hastings sort of broke with Poirot midway during the book, when it started becoming clear that a woman that Hastings loved, Dulcie Duveen, could be a suspect. At one point Hastings physically held down Poirot and let Duveen flee; but Poirot does not get side-tracked, and at the end, Poirot brings them together again. The book was more French based than English, with the crime being committed in a French location, and the investigating magistrate and detective both being French. Interestingly, this book was dedicated upon its release to her husband Archibald Christie, who later acquired a lover and divorced her a few years later.



The book starts with Hastings falling in love with a bright vivacious girl (who seems to ignore him to some extent as an old fashioned person); he tells Poirot about this when they meet, and then Poirot gets a wire (among the many mundane pieces of mail that he gets including requests to find lost dogs) from the South of France asking for help from a Monsieur Paul Renauld. Poirot is interested and decides to go there along with Hastings; they reach the villa Villa Genevieve in Merlinville-sur-Mer on the French coast where they discover that they are too late; Monsieur Paul Renauld is already dead. He was killed just a few hours ago and left in a shallow grave.
He was killed after 2 masked invaders came into the home around 2 AM, tied up his wife, and took him away wanting to know a secret, and then they killed him. However, apparently the door was open and there was no sign of forced entry. Their son Jack had been sent away on business, and there were three female servants in the house. And there is a French investigating magistrate, as well as a egoist French detective.
The story involves ladies who used to visit Monsieur Paul Renauld at night, a decades old murder crime, a fight between father and son, an altered will, an apparent second murder, a missing weapon, and many twists in the story. Read the book, it is pretty interesting.