A book that drops a mystery on you in the first page and doesn’t stop the intrigue until the last page.

So normally I'm a very slow reader (it took me 3 months to finish A Gentleman in Moscow) but there's one particular author that I've never been able to put down once I start, and that's Agatha Christie. Every book of hers that I start, I end up devouring in a single night.

And I think part of that is just how lean and effective her writing is, yes it's got the typical witty british dialogue, a fair bit of small talk and humour, but she doesn't bother with a whole lot of exposition or take time to painstakingly introduce characters, describe them and get into their backstories/histories. Nor does she spend a lot of time painting the scene or explaining the setting. If it's important, we'll get back to it later. No, what she does is she'll immediately drop you into a mystery in the opening, and she'll spend the rest of the book taking you to places and introducing you to characters and never dwelling upon a single detail, just one scene to the next. And this keeps happening until the grand reveal at the end where she'll show you through her detective's final speech how and where she laid all the dominoes at all the right places for the story to make sense.

And by not dwelling on any single person, the intrigue is even more elevated. We notice something that may seem out of place, something that feels like a red herring, but we never know for sure because it's never explicitly focused on. It all feels so fulfilling in the end, reading her books it always feels like she wants you to figure out her twist, but she isn't going to make it easy. She isn't interested in outsmarting the reader like so many other detective authors out there, but she's not going to hold your hand through the process either. In the end, what this creates is a deep sense of intrigue that doesn't let you go until the grand reveal is done. You want to keep reading, if not for the mystery then at least to find out if that one thing you noticed five chapters earlier becomes relevant in the end or not.

No subplots, no useless drama, no genius character portraits of random side characters. A simple mystery, a series of interviews and investigations and in the final chapter, the payoff. I need something like that. Something that sinks it's claws into me in the first chapter, facehugs me so I can focus on nothing but the mystery, breadcrumbs me throughout the story, and doesn't let its hooks out until the very last pages.