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** spoiler alert ** For a while, I have been thinking about how to tell you all of my feelings on this book. At first, I didn't think the book was worthy of a review because there's not much to be said about it, but today I woke up and realized that the book that made me angry the whole way through (aside from the very beginning) deserves at least a mini-review. Here's a list of all the reasons I didn't like this:

1. The main character, Clarissa, whom we are supposed to like, is very annoying. She has almost no personality aside from liking to tell lies all the time and then being shocked when people don't believe her when she tells the truth. What did she expect? I know it's supposed to be a part of her character arc, but at the end of the book, she remained rather immature and frivolous, so obviously I never enjoyed reading about this person.

2. Her two male friends serve only as comic relief characters and "male friend" cliches.

3. Her third male friend, Jeremy, is such an obvious villain that it's unbelievable, even if this weren't an Agatha Christie novel. Also, his motive is senseless. He killed the rich guy and then threatened to kill both Clarissa and the nine-year-old child she takes care of for money, although he's already rich. I understand the lust for more money, but I don't think it's worth three murders.

4. Speaking of the rich guy, Oliver, he's every jerk father figure cliche inside of one character, conveniently like that so that the plot could move along easily and that there would be more suspects because he's simply that despicable.

5. I wish that Miranda, Oliver's wife, had shown up at some point in the story. She's only talked about when the plot demands it, so we never get to see her perspective or anything of her personality outside of those stories, and for not only Oliver's wife but also the mother of Philippa (the child), she's a strangely unimportant character.

6. Philippa isn't a convincing child character. The arc of the spider's web is the best she (and Clarissa) get, but aside from that, she's merely annoying comic relief. She keeps on saying that she's hungry and complaining about school and stuff, and I would have expected a bigger spark of life from a nine-year-old.

7. Every attempt at humour falls flat. I've already talked about the comic relief characters, and we could also say that Clarissa is one of them with her "quirky" untrue stories, but there's also a recurring theme about Jones being a cliche surname, and that's all for humour, which makes it seem like there was no effort put into it.

8. The book contains no prose whatsoever. Only the speech tags from the play remain, but with "X said" from time to time instead of "X:" I could never imagine anything. I never got a sense of setting. I couldn't tell you what a single room in the house looks like. It's obvious that Charles Osborne took advantage of the fact that Christie was senile at the time (hence all the books from that era having bad reception and this being written terribly for sure, so now I know that all of it must have been deserved) to make some money, but when you adapt a play into the written form, you do what was done with the plays of writers like Shakespeare, Wilde, etc. and simply transcribe the dialogue, stage directions, introductions and all that stuff. It's that easy!

9. I've read solely one Christie novel aside from Spider's Web, The Murder on Orient Express, but I know that she could do so much better than this, and that is also seen in the police investigations and the final gathered evidence. In the latter, the investigations are done carefully and every little clue matters, but in the former, the investigations don't really matter and there is barely any evidence. The final unravelling is simply Jeremy explaining how he came to have his stupid motive and how he managed to hit Oliver with the baseball bat while making it look like it was Philippa without being noticed. How underwhelming.

Now that I have finally cleansed myself of all these negative feelings, do I have any positive ones?

No. None. Even the length doesn't feel too right, but that's enough complaining for today. Thank you and goodbye.