Name: Murder on the Links
ISBN: 9781940849850

Murder on the Links

Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is summoned to France after receiving a distressing letter with a urgent cry for help. Upon his arrival in Merlinville-sur-Mer, the investigator finds the man who penned the letter, the South American millionaire Monsieur Renauld, stabbed to death and his body flung into a freshly dug open grave on the golf course adjoining the property. Meanwhile the millionaire's wife is found bound and gagged in her room. Apparently, it seems that Renauld and his wife were victims of a failed break-in, resulting in Renauld's kidnapping and death. There's no lack of suspects: his wife, whose dagger served as the weapon; his embittered son, who would have killed for independence; and his mistress, who refused to be ignored - and each felt deserving of the dead man's fortune. The police think they've found the cumprit. But Poirot has his doubts. Why is the dead man wearing an overcoat that is too big for him? And who was the impassioned love-letter in the pocket for? Before Poirot can answer these questions, the case is turned upside down by the discovery of a second, identically murdered corpse...

What Hacker News says

SymbioteNov 2020

Standard Ebooks is on the front page at the moment, but unfortunately doesn't have these titles. Would you particularly recommend any of the five they do have:

- Poirot Investigates

- The Secret Adversary

- The Man in the Brown Suit

- The Murder on the Links

- The Mysterious Affair at Styles

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie

thread

philsnowNov 2020

oh very nice. My machine doesn't have a `tail -r`, but it has `tac`, which I guess does the same thing.

I tweaked your output to put author first, to make sorting work better:

    curl -s https://standardebooks.org/opds/all | awk '/<title>/ {split($0,a,">");split(a[2],b,"<")} /<name>/{split($0,c,">");split(c[2],d,"<");print d[1]" - "b[1]}' | sort

gives something like:

    A. A. Milne - The Red House Mystery
    A. Merritt - The Moon Pool
    Aesop - Fables
    Agatha Christie - Poirot Investigates
    Agatha Christie - The Man in the Brown Suit
    Agatha Christie - The Murder on the Links
    Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles
    Agatha Christie - The Secret Adversary
    Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay
    ...

thread

thinkersilverSep 2013

The author mentions that he spent a lot of time using English without ever listening to it. A big problem is the way English( or languages) are taught or learnt that causes these problems.

One trick/method that I used while perfecting my German accent was shadowing that I found in a lanaguage forum somewhere. I took a book that I understood in the target language, in this case it was Agatha Christie's Murder on the Links; bought the audio book ( Mord auf dem Links), then repeated after the reader at pace without looking at the text. It was tiring mentally sometimes, but it helped greatly in pronunciation and aural comprehension of the target langauge.

I did the same for movies. I remember getting the Matrix in German. Technical writing is different I guess but I hope this helps someone, at the very least, in acquiring an idiomatic proficiency.

thread