The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

by Agatha Christie Book 4 in the Hercule Poirot series.

First published 1926

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In the village of King’s Abbot, a wealthy widow dies after being blackmailed and Roger Ackroyd is found stabbed in his locked study after receiving a revealing letter. Dr James Sheppard, the local physician, records the investigation and introduces his recently retired neighbour, Hercule Poirot.

Poirot studies the household’s financial pressures, secret engagements and carefully managed timelines while Sheppard’s sister Caroline supplies a parallel network of village intelligence. The novel turns narration itself into evidence and examines how confidently respectable people control what others believe about them, making the enclosed community of the 1920s central to one of Christie’s most influential experiments in detective form.