Everyone blamed Emily Arundell's accident on a rubber ball left on the stairs by her frisky terrier. But the more she thought about her fall, the more convinced she became that one of her relatives was trying to kill her. On April 17th she wrote her suspicions in a letter to Hercule Poirot. Mysteriously, he didn't receive the letter until June 28th by which time Emily was already dead.

Hercule Poirot's quiet supper in a London coffee house is interrupted when a young woman confides to him that she is about to be murdered. She is terrified, but begs Poirot not to find and punish her killer. Once she is dead, she insists, justice will have been done. Later that night, Poirot learns that three guests at a fashionable London hotel have been murdered, and a cufflink has been placed in each one's mouth. Could there be a connection with...

The time is World War I. Hercule Poirot is one of a small group of Belgian refugees sheltering in a rural English village. When the mistress of the manor is murdered, the family members occupying the house all become suspects, including her newlywed young husband.

Linnet Doyle is young, beautiful, and rich. She's the girl who has everything-including the man her best friend loves. Linnet and her new husband take a cruise on the Nile, where they meet the brilliant detective Hercule Poirot. It should be an idyllic trip, yet Poirot has a vague, uneasy feeling that something is dangerously amiss.