This was the first Christie novel I ever read, when I was eight or nine years old, and it sent me headlong into a lifelong affair with Agatha Christie and the mystery genre as a whole.

When Poirot meets Nick Buckley, a young and dashing heiress, he knows at once that someone is trying to kill her. Naturally, Poirot’s little grey cells are up to the task … aren’t they?

Maybe a hot take, but I love Tommy and Tuppence every bit as much as I do Poirot and Miss Marple. In this, their first novel, the pair of old friends reunite after the Great War and decide to start a business together. Alas, they weren’t quite expecting business to be so dangerous.

Colonel Race may be the least famous of Christie’s detectives, but he is by no means less interesting or capable than the rest. This book, where he sets out to find who wanted heiress Rosemary Barton dead, offers resounding proof.

Nobody liked 13-year-old Joyce, but who didn’t like her enough to murder her? Did it have anything to do with the murder she swore she’d witnessed? After a fateful Halloween party, it is up to Poirot to find out.

Being on trial for murder is awful. But if Hercule Poirot is on your corner? Well then, things might be slightly less awful than you think, as Elinor Carlisle, on trial for the murder of her romantic rival, finds out in this book.

If you were getting annoyed because I had not yet included Miss Marple, fear not! I could never leave her out of a list like this. Murder at the Vicarage and The Body in the Library might be her best-known cases, but this book holds its own with aplomb.

Young Gwenda recruits Miss Marple to exorcise the ghosts in her house. But are they actual ghosts? Whether real or pretend, why are they haunting Gwenda?

Gothic mysteries are one of my very favorite things to read, and when written by Agatha Christie? There’s nothing better.

In this book, Tommy and Tuppence visit an elderly aunt at a gothic nursing home, thinking nothing of her distrust of the doctors. That is, until other residents volunteer information that leads the duo down a dangerous path that could doom them both.

A historical Agatha Christie set in Ancient Egypt? Yes please.

When Imhotep’s mistress turns up dead at the bottom of a cliff, the culprits appear to be obvious: his children. But in true Christie fashion, the motives behind the death may be more complicated than they seem.