Sophie Hannah - The Killings at Kingfisher Hill

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Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2020

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Sophie Hannah asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2021

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A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008264529

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008264543

Version: 2021-02-03

For Jen –

a ‘re-dedication’ in celebration of her reincarnation as an Agatha Christie fan.

As always I would like to thank the ‘gang’—James and Mathew Prichard and everyone at Agatha Christie Ltd, David Brawn, Kate Elton, Fliss Denham and the team at HarperCollins, Julia Elliott and her colleagues at William Morrow in the US, and all the dedicated and talented teams who publish my Poirot novels all over the world—thank you!

I’m hugely grateful also to my amazing agent Peter Straus and everyone at Rogers, Coleridge & White, to my family and friends, and to my lovely readers and fellow Poirot-and-Agatha fans. Thank you to Emily Winslow for her incisive editorial feedback, to Kate Jones for all her amazing help in the last year and a half, to my Dream Authors who are all amazing and ace and teach me so much, and to Faith Tilleray, my website and tech guru. Thank you also to Claire George, who suggested the name of another character: Marcus Capeling—a great name which I loved as soon as I heard it.

And last but most, thanks to the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, whose books never stop delighting and surprising me, no matter how many times I read them.

Cover

Title Page THE KILLINGS AT KINGFISHER HILL THE NEW HERCULE POIROT MYSTERY Sophie Hannah

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1. Midnight Gathering

2. The Seat of Danger

3. Richard Devonport’s Letter

4. The Missing Manifest

5. An Abstract Confession

6. The Devonport Family

7. Confessions for Dinner

8. The Chronology

9. The Training of the Brain

10. Helen Acton

11. A Body at Little Key

12. Irritating Little Questions

13. Aunt Hester

14. Poirot Makes a Task List

15. A New Confession

16. Little Key, Heavy Door

Epilogue

The Agatha Christie Collection

Keep Reading …

About the Authors

Also by Sophie Hannah

About the Publisher

It is not midnight when this tale begins, but ten minutes before two on the afternoon of 22nd February 1931. That was when the strangeness started, as M. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool (his friend, and the teller of this story) stood with thirty strangers in a dispersed huddle—no one too close to anybody else, but all of us easily identifiable as an assembly—on London’s Buckingham Palace Road.

Our group of men and women and one child (an infant carried by his mother in a bundle arrangement that presented a rather mummified appearance) were soon to be travellers on a journey that felt peculiar and puzzling to me long before I knew quite how extraordinary it would become.