Sad Cypress

Sad Cypress is a detective novel by the British writer Agatha Christie, published by the Collins Crime Club in March 1940 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead later the same year. The title comes from a song in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Elinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are cousins by marriage, engaged to each other, and due to inherit the fortune of their aunt, Laura Welman, who is partly paralysed after a stroke and frank about how little she enjoys living in that state. An anonymous letter telling them that someone is working on their aunt's affections turns out to be about Mary Gerrard, the lodgekeeper's daughter, whom Mrs Welman has taken under her wing. Elinor and Roddy visit Hunterbury, and the letter is burned before either of them works out who wrote it.

Christie tells the story with the courtroom in view: witnesses and lawyers lay out the facts of the case as Hercule Poirot assembles the account that the police and the court have missed, and the prosecution's case rests on a point of law that the detective turns over in his own way.