Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, published in Britain by the Collins Crime Club in 1937 and in the United States the following year. It is one of the Poirot books readers name first, and like Murder on the Orient Express it puts a closed group of suspects on a journey, so the detective has a boat, a passenger list and nowhere to send anybody.

The setting is Egypt, mostly the stretch of the river between Shellal and Wadi Halfa. Linnet Ridgeway, rich and newly married to Simon Doyle, is being followed by Jacqueline de Bellefort, the friend she took him from, and the quarrel between the three of them is public long before anyone dies. Poirot is drawn into a case that begins as a matter of social embarrassment.

Christie keeps the Egyptian landscape doing structural work: the murders are tied to where the boat docks and to what can be seen from the bank at night. The solution depends on timing and on one piece of misdirection, and Poirot only assembles it after a second death narrows the field.