text: First published in 1936, this is the 12th Poirot book, the 3rd Superintendent Battle book, and the 2nd Colonel Race book, and has no narrator. It's the first case in which Superintendent Battle, Mrs. Oliver, or Col. Race appear together with Poirot or each other, and the only case in which *all* do so at once.
  
  The story opens at an exhibition of snuffboxes, where Poirot encounters Mr. Shaitana, a collector with a catty manner and a knack for gossip. Shaitana deliberately cultivates a Mephistopholean pose, which at first makes him seem like the potential quarry in the case - but it becomes clear that he's a victim waiting to happen.
  
  For Shaitana, like a few other collectors in Christie's universe, has succumbed to a foolish temptation, and begun collecting *people* - and not just people of talent or genius, but murderers. And being a connoisseur, he collects only the best: those who have gotten away with it. He amuses himself on this occasion by boasting to Poirot of his hobby, without naming names, and inviting him to a little supper party to meet his collection of "tigers" (Poirot having just pointed out that he himself could admire a tiger, but would do so from outside the tiger's cage, having respect for the danger.)
  
  Poirot accepts the supper invitation, however, to find that there are seven other guests, including the three other detectives as well as four guests who are presumably the murderers: explorer Major Despard, a strong silent type; Mrs. Lorrimer, a middle-aged widow who is *very* serious about bridge; timid young Anne Meredith; and Dr. Roberts, a loud and jovial general practitioner.
  
  Shaitana drops hints referring to four possible methods of murder, but otherwise the subject does not come up, and the guests proceed to play bridge after supper - arising from the final game to find their host dead, stabbed sitting beside the fire in full view of the players!
  
  This is, of course, Poirot's fantasy case, as he once remarked in THE ABC MURDERS - because there is no tangible evidence against any one person more than another. There are only the people themselves, and their memories of the evening, and the bridge scores reflecting how the evening progressed. Solving the case depends entirely on being able to understand the people involved. But how to get them to reveal their true selves to an interrogator - or to uncover the crimes that Shaitana believed they'd committed and gotten away with?
  
  Rather than following Poirot's viewpoint in third person throughout, some chapters follow Battle, Race, or Mrs. Oliver as they conduct their own enquiries into the case. Each represents a different style: Battle is a professional police officer, Race an empire-builder-type secret agent, and Mrs. Oliver a writer of detective stories. Battle, of course, has a duty to investigate Shaitana's murder, and does so in an orthodox style, cultivating an image of plodding hard work that tempts one to underestimate him. Race deals with checking out Major Despard, the explorer who's most clearly his kind of person. Mrs. Oliver, for her part, works on worming information out of not only Anne Meredith, but her roommate Rhonda (whose attitude is that Anne could've lived like a duchess for the rest of her life on blackmail if she'd been paying attention).
  
  And, of course, there's Poirot. He's really fascinating to watch in this one as he interacts with each suspect in turn, pursuing two major lines of questioning:
  (1) Describe how the bridge games played out, and
  (2) Describe the scene of the murder (the elaborate collector's room in Shaitana's house where the bridge games were played).
  
  See if you can figure out where Poirot's questions lead before he reveals his reasoning to his colleagues, and what he learned from the responses he received
  