Oh boy, time for more murder! Put your thinking caps on, everyone, we’ve got a crime to solve!
After a night on the town, a group of four young friends find themselves locked out of their flat. The two men of the group climb up a disposal chute to get inside, unknowingly stopping in the wrong apartment. Here, they make a grim discovery: the dead body of a woman, hidden behind the drapes. Luckily for them, their upstairs neighbor is none other than Hercule Poirot! Now it’s up to him, along with his four new companions, to solve the riddle!
Sorry, Hastings. No mystery for you today.
I’ll be real: I didn’t really like this one at all. It had an interesting premise, but that’s about it. The characters are all flat and forgettable, half the story is meaningless meandering, and the resolution is rushed and unsatisfying.
The ending here is pretty bad. The twist reveal centers around information we never received until the twist itself. It’s sudden, cheap, and unsatisfying. Then the story just… ends. We don’t even see Poirot catch the killer!
There’s also a romantic subplot. But that one is even less baked than the mystery. It’s just one guy who has some feelings for one girl, then Poirot talks to him about it, and then the story ends. There is no buildup, no development, nothing. You could cut it out and it changes virtually nothing.
‘The Third-Story Flat’ is pretty disappointing. It’s short, so it’s not like you’d waste too much of your life reading it. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever come back to it. One of the weaker Poirot shorts so far.
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