The Murder on the Links

Name: The Murder on the Links
Rating: 3.87 (121496 reviews)
Author: Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot • Book 2

by Agatha Christie

3.87 Goodreads

(121.5K ratings)

Published 1923 Mystery

Get the Book →

Kindle, paperback, or hardcover · Prefer listening? Try the audiobook →

Why You'll Love This

A body in a golf course grave, a wife already bound and gagged, and Poirot arrives just too late — Christie makes you feel the case slipping out of reach from page one.

Great if you want: a tangled web of motives where every suspect feels genuinely guilty
The experience: brisk and twisty, with a romantic subplot that adds unexpected tension
The writing: Christie plants her misdirections so cleanly you'll only spot them in hindsight
Skip if: you find Hastings' romantic distractions more annoying than charming

About This Book

When a desperate letter arrives pleading for protection, Hercule Poirot rushes to the French coast — only to find he's arrived too late. The man who wrote to him lies murdered on the golf course, stabbed and thrown into an open grave, while his wife is discovered bound and gagged inside the villa. What follows is a case thick with inheritance, hidden pasts, and a tangle of people who each had urgent reasons to want this man dead. Christie keeps the stakes personal and the atmosphere charged — this is a story about secrets that rot beneath respectable surfaces, and the particular violence that erupts when money and desire collide.

This is Christie in early, hungry form, still sharpening her tools and clearly enjoying every moment of it. The novel introduces the dynamic between Poirot and Hastings at its most lively and combative, with Hastings' romantic impulsiveness constantly threatening to derail the investigation in ways that are genuinely funny. Christie also plays with structure here in ways she'd rarely repeat, layering competing timelines and rival detectives to keep readers pleasantly off-balance from start to finish.