Thoughts on Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie

I'm going to be honest about how I'm going to be doing book reviews.  I'm not going to be a prospective book critic and I don't ever plan on being one.  Despite this, I'll try to convey my thoughts as an average reader to you.

I had to read Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie over the summer for my English class.  I thought it wasn't so bad because the mystery novel seemed to have a very different style of plot than most detective stories seem to have.  (Then again I'm comparing this book to those pulp mystery novels that I used to thumb through while at Stop & Shop back in middle school.)

For me the story itself was hard to get into, especially if this is your first Hercule Poirot book.  This makes it hard to understand some (but certainly not critical) references to a previous book in the Poirot series.  The beginning is very captivating, since that's when the pivotal murder happens.  Then the story gets stagnant for about 50 pages, from what I can recall.  This is because this is when Poirot is being brought into town and he's just settling himself in.  Also this part would only be appreciated by those who've read all the other Poirot books, since they bring Spence who's a character from the series.

Besides that, the story was pretty compelling.  I don't mean it was really action-packed but it made me want to read it to the end.  I read the whole book in 1 summer day just because of this.  Not many books compel me to read the whole book in one day.

The only downside to the book was that there was this anti-climatic point of the story.  You know what it is when you read this passage, somewhere three-fourths of the book in.  It goes like this:
"[Poirot:] '... I have the idea, you see, that a lot of separated incidents might tie up more closely than anyone has thought.  Not all of them.  Probably not all of them, but several of them.'
'It sounds interesting,' said Mrs. Oliver, 'but I can't see-'..."  (p. 170) [in my edition, which I don't know and I don't have anymore.]

 In the end, Hallowe'en Party was a pretty good book.  I just don't see the historical importance or controversy about it.  Maybe it's because there are close to no accessible sources online that talk about it.