Taken at the Flood

September 4, 2006
Hercule Poirot fans will be pleased to hear Hugh Fraser, who plays Captain Hastings on PBS's Mystery!
and A&E's Poirot
, recount Christie's intriguing 1948 novel (published in the U.S. as There Is a Tide
). The celebrated Belgian sleuth visits the sleepy English village of Warmsley Vale to check into the background of Gordon Cloade, supposedly a victim of the London Blitz. He had wed an attractive young widow, the former Mrs. Underhay, now the sole possessor of the Cloade family fortune. The deceased's sister-in-law told Poirot that "spirits" informed her that the widow's first husband is still among the living, raising suspicions about Cloade's demise. Fraser's tone at once reassures listeners that, just as on television, they are in capable hands. He does a fine job creating a variety of character voices, distinguishing one from another with clarity but without excessive flamboyance. The release of any Christie is an event, and it does not taken an abundance of "little gray cells" to deduce that this audio will be well-received.

This classic Christie, originally published as THERE IS A TIDE, opens with Hercule Poirot in a London club, where he overhears a story that later helps to sort out a tangled murder case. Hugh Fraser, known to PBS "Mystery" fans in the role of Poirot's sidekick, Captain Hastings, is elegant in the voices of the gentry--sowing bewilderment and an undercurrent of guilt to keep readers wondering to the end just who may be the villains. Fraser is equally deft in portraying the village folk and the Irish gate-crashers who married into the Cloade family and won the family fortune when a bomb in the London Blitz killed patriarch Gordon Cloade. D.P.D. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine