1001 Stories For The Road

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the third Poirot novel from Agatha Christie, and it was very well accepted and highly acclaimed. The Society of Crime Writers awarded it with "Best Crime Novel Ever Written". I'll offer a summary of these first two chapters to get you up to speed: The first-person narrator of the story, Dr. James Sheppard, lives with his older unmarried sister Caroline in the country village of King’s Abbot on the outskirts of London. As the local physician with an active practice, Dr. Sheppard becomes emmeshed in a mysterious suicide and murder and the ensuing investigations into them over a nine-day period. Dr. Sheppard begins his account on the morning of September 17 with the overdose death of his patient Mrs. Ferrars, a wealthy widow whose husband had died the previous year. Dr. Sheppard had attended Mr. Ferrars’s death as well, ruling he died of acute gastritis resulting from alcoholism. Now he must determine Mrs. Ferrars’s cause of death. Caroline has an inexhaustible curiosity about ever