Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials on Netflix, a two-hour movie stretched to occupy three one-hour episodes, is for people who found “Murder, She Wrote” to be a little too edgy. Or for people who wished that the Crawley family of “Downton Abbey” could have belonged to one of those ridiculous, only-in-the-movies secret societies in which the members meet wearing masks and cloaks for no logical reason, given that no one outside the group can see them and they all know each other. Based on the eponymous Christie novel from 1929, the show offers lots of nice location shooting in England and plenty of 1920’s atmosphere, but the only good reason to watch it is for the strong performance by Mia McKenna-Bruce as Bundle Brent, the spunky amateur sleuth who is determined to get to the bottom of the inevitable nefarious activities, including the murder of her almost-fiancé. Aside from a cameo by Iain Glen, a secondary role for Helena Bonham-Carter as Bundle’s mother (a casting choice that eventually makes sense), and a wasted Martin Freeman as a tedious Scotland Yard detective, I had a hard time sorting out the rest of the cast. All the foppish young men circling around Bundle seemed interchangeable, as did the older men and women tasked with playing high-society red herrings. Skip this one and watch Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson in the sleazy, hugely entertaining adaptation of Alice Feeney’s novel His and Hers instead. I’ll bet you a million dollars you’ll never guess whodunit.
Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip is a first novel, but it doesn’t read like one. Schaefer avoids nearly all the missteps of the first-timer, which can include the insertion of extraneous and obviously autobiographic details, the tendency to explain or describe too much, the dialogue that runs on past its service of advancing the plot, and the shaky control of point of view. Schaefer gives us a series of scenes that never fail to engross us, and he writes with precision and wit in multiple voices, all of which he is in masterful control. I couldn’t put this book down because of the way each self-contained episode engages and entertains and because of the suspense that Schaefer builds from episode to episode, but after I got to the end and reflected on the sum of the parts, I realized with dismay that I didn’t especially like the finished product.
The ending of the book offers a resolution so dumbfoundingly improbable, not to mention inexplicable, that it forced me to revisit other moments in the novel where Schaefer veers into the surreal and the contrived. A boxing match in Africa ends when the ring gets washed out to sea in a storm. Important characters with stories of their own get written out abruptly. People in possession of an important driver’s license carry it with them even in outlandish circumstances (see the aforementioned African boxing match on the beach). Ditto for a Haitian passport. Teen romances push the boundaries of mistaken identity tales. Schaefer is a damn good writer (grade A+ for stylistic artistry) but his audacity as a storyteller could use some redirection (grade B- for narrative control). I should note in fairness that this novel is on several “Best of” lists for 2025 and that I am filing a minority report.