[soul-of-life]

Agatha Christie

Death Comes as the End




Plot introduction


The quiet lives of an Egyptian family are disturbed when the father, Imhotep, returns from the North with his new concubine, Nofret, who begins to sow discontent amongst them. Once the deaths begin, fears are aroused of a curse upon the house, but is the killer closer to home?



Plot summary


The novel is primarily written from the perspective of Renisenb, a young widow who is just reacquainting herself with her family when her father brings Nofret into their lives. Nofret soon disrupts and antagonises Imhotep's sons, Yahmose, Sobek and Ipy, as well as their wives. After Imhotep is called away, Nofret presses Kameni and Henet into service. Satipy and Kait, the elder sons wives, attempt to bully Nofret with tricks, but the plan backfires when Nofret appeals to Imhotep and he threatens to throw all his sons and their families out of the household on his return. Suddenly everyone has a motive to kill her and when she is found dead at the foot of a cliff, an accident seems unlikely.
The convenient pretence that Nofret has not been murdered is just getting established when Satipy is killed: she is seen apparently to throw herself to her death in terror from the same cliff while walking with Yahmose. Is it Nofret’s vengeful spirit that she was looking at over Yahmose’s shoulder moments before her death? These rumours only gather pace when Yahmose and Sobek drink poisoned wine. Sobek dies, but Yahmose’s recovery seems to be hindered, perhaps by a more insidious slow-acting poison. A boy whose description suggests that he has seen Nofret’s ghost poisoning the wine himself dies of poison shortly afterwards.
Ipy starts to boast about his new, better position with his father and plots to get rid of Henet after talking to his father and tells her so. That next morning, Ipy was found dead in the lake, drowned.
Kameni seems to have fallen in love with Renisenb, and eventually asks her to marry him. Unsure whether she loves him or Hori, whom she has known since she was a child when he mended her toys, she leaves the choice effectively in her father’s hands and becomes engaged to Kameni. She realises, however, that his relationship with Nofret was closer than she had supposed, and that jealousy may have influenced Nofret’s bitter hatred towards the family.
As Renisenb, Hori, and Esa begin to investigate the possibility of a human murderer, the field of suspects is further narrowed when Ipy, himself a likely suspect, is drowned. Esa attempts to flush out the murderer by dropping a hint about the death of Satipy, but is herself murdered by means of an unguent made of poisoned wool fat. Henet – momentarily powerful in the chaos - is smothered in linen.
It is on the same cliff path where Nofret was murdered that the killer makes one final attempt. Renisenb hears footsteps behind her and turns to see a look of murderous hatred in the eyes of her brother, Yahmose. On the brink of her own death, she realises that Satipy was not looking in fear at anything beyond Yahmose … she was looking straight at him. His consumption of the poisoned wine had been cleverly limited, and his recovery deliberately was made to seem less rapid than it was while he committed the later murders.
Even as Renisenb realises some of this, Hori slays Yahmose with an arrow and she is saved. Her final choice is which of the scribes to marry: Kameni, a lively husband not unlike her first, or Hori, an older and more enigmatic figure. She makes her choice and falls into Hori’s arms.



:qatarw_com_52228917

محتوى مخفي

يجب عليك الرد لرؤية النص المخفي

Enjoy