Episode 119: STAY MYSTERIOUS: Death Comes as the End Review

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters

Sarah Harrison  00:12

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe to the present. We’re discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world’s most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters  00:33

And I’m your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we’re excited you’re joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Carolyn Daughters  00:48

Today’s sponsor is Harrison Heritage, a specialty grower dedicated to preserving and cultivating rare and historic flora and fauna. They have a strong focus on early American and Virginia heirloom cultivated varieties, using regenerative, pasture-focused, and experimental farming practices. Harrison Heritage prioritizes soil health as the foundation for nutrient-rich, resilient ecosystems. Their mission is simple: to safeguard the flavors, genetics, and agricultural traditions of the past, while fostering a healthier future, Harrison Heritage preserving the taste of history, and we’re thrilled to have them as our sponsor. And Sarah, Nate, and the whole Harrison Heritage crew are just getting started, and they would love to have you follow them on Facebook @HarrisonHeritage or on Instagram @Harrison.Heritage.Farm to keep up with what’s new and what’s next.

Sarah Harrison  01:46

Carolyn, have you been staying mysterious?

Carolyn Daughters  01:50

I have, especially for the last several minutes in preparation for this Death Comes as the End review.

Sarah Harrison  01:54

Good.

Carolyn Daughters  01:55

I mean, it’s hard to pull off all day, but for small periods of time, yes.

Sarah Harrison  02:01

Right, right, and I think this is a new fun segment that we’ve started this day mysterious, where we keep the books a little bit more mysterious, and this was your suggestion from some of our listeners. Before we dive into our Death Comes as the End review, tell me a little bit about the idea here.

Carolyn Daughters  02:22

A friend was listening to our podcast, I believe, in her car, and was interested in the book. It was Green for Danger by Christianna Brand, and it was our second book. It is our second book of 2026, and got to a place where we revealed, or we announced we were going to reveal some big news about the story. I believe we were going to state the name of the killer, which we do in our episodes because we are a book club, and as a book club, we talk about the whole book. We talk any part of the book; it’s all fair game. And in a mystery book club, you would naturally talk about who committed the murder. Well, she stopped the recording right then and she said, “Oh, now I have to go read the book and then I’ll come back.” And I thought, “That’s amazing, awesome, and I’m, I’m. You should read the book because it’s great, and look forward to you coming back.” But what if we had content specifically for people who want to learn about the history of mystery, book by book, with the list that we’ve chosen, and want to get a teaser so they know which ones they want to read.

Sarah Harrison  03:33

Right. I have a couple of friends, and they’ll look at our book list for the year, and they’ll say, “Okay, well, these look interesting, so maybe they’ll pick out the ones they want to read and then listen to the episode or the discussion. And I think sometimes if you’re going to be choosy and not read all of them, which we get it, even though they are all pretty great, sometimes you might want a little bit more discussion to make those decisions to hear a little bit more about what’s resonating and if that’s going to be something that interests you. I will say these classics, and I’ve always been a classics person in probably every genre, but classics are classics for a reason, and all of these books, I feel like really have stood the test of time for various reasons. They’re all excellent, but if you haven’t read them, and I almost always haven’t before we do the episode, then here is a little summary we’re going to do today. Today, we’re going to share our Death Comes as the End review. It’s an amazing novel by Agatha Christie.

Carolyn Daughters  04:44

And this episode is spoiler free, folks. This is a safe one.

Sarah Harrison  04:47

This episode is safe. You can listen to the whole. It’s a mini episode, right? It’s a 20 minute spoiler free episode. We’re introducing you to one of Agatha Christie’s most unusual novels. A murder mystery set in ancient Egypt. When you think of Agatha Christie, you may picture an English country house, a village, a train, or perhaps an elegant hotel. You probably don’t picture Egypt around 2000 B.C. Death Comes as the End takes Agatha Christie’s familiar ingredients: family resentment, money jealousy, secrets, and murder, and transports them 4000 years into the past. This was a really fun book, Carolyn. Do you want to give us a little quick setup?

Carolyn Daughters  05:33

Well, first of all, I had never read this book, and I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie, and I am so happy that we found this book and that we’ve included it. It’s published in 1944. It the story centers on a young widow who returns to her family home with her daughter and her father Imhotep. He’s this mortuary priest. It’s called a ka-priest, K A dash priest, and that’s a mortuary priest. And the household is pretty good sized. It includes the young woman is Renisenb, and her brothers. She has three brothers. They have wives. They have children running around. There’s servants. There’s dependents. There’s a grandmother. The family order is disrupted. However, when the father, the mortuary priest Imhotep, returns with his young concubine, her name is Nofret, and she is super tapped in, and she recognizes almost immediately the tensions in the household, and she exploits them to her benefit. So, as these resentments intensify, and there are like mini spats happening throughout the household, and alliances shift, and then we have a mysterious death that we are going to leave open ended here. But you’re going to want to learn more about this mysterious death. Here’s the thing about this book: aside from being set 4000 years into the past, there’s no Hercule Poirot, there’s no Miss Marple. The mystery unfolds from within the household, which makes it, I think, very interesting and reminded me a little bit of And Then There Were None, where there’s no detective navigating all of the events that unfold, and it in some ways, for me, increases the psychological tension because there’s no parent figure or very strong-willed, talented detective shepherding events.

Sarah Harrison  07:36

That was also what it reminded me of reading it. In thinking about this Death Comes as the End review, I was wondering if that was the situation we were going to end up in there. And I do want to throw out there, listeners. You’re probably aware if you’re longtime listeners, but if you aren’t, we do have all these books pre-curated for you. So if you want to get your own copy of any of these history of mystery books, as we call this particular book club segment, or any of our modern authors’ books, we have a bookstore on Amazon. We have a bookstore on bookshop.org, and we’ve been partnering this year with a local bookstore. So if you are in Roanoke, Virginia. You can stop by the Bibliopub. They actually have a fully curated list of our books on the books. It’s like the only place that exists, probably outside of me and Carolyn’s bookshelves. But they have all of the books there for you to buy. And I need to go take a picture of it right now. And they can special order books for you as well, but Amazon has all the books. Bookshop.org has most of the books, and that gives a larger cut to your small bookshops that you select, and then of course a tiny fractional incentive to us: your Tea Tonic and Toxin hosts. I will say also that a lot of times our guests, like in our Agatha Christie episode, in Death Comes Is the End, our guest is Dr. Nicky Nielsen, an Egyptologist.

Carolyn Daughters  09:20

He has also written other books that we discuss, Egyptomaniacs, as well as his own first mystery novel. So, if you want to find other works by guests, that’s on the guest list as well. So, you can get any of the books there. And if there’s ever an issue with that, please let us know and we’ll fix it. So those are all very important points because you don’t have to hunt around for this stuff. And we want you to read this book because wow, this book was cool and it’s fast. It’s not super long. It’s fast and it’s a page turner. Sarah, what was your first reaction when I told you, “hey! I’ve added a book to our 2026 reading list. We’re in the 1940s. Let’s do this book set in ancient Egypt!” What were your thoughts?

Sarah Harrison  10:11

I’m usually for it, Carolyn. I’m not in a hurry here. I’m not in a rush to like move through time. If anything, I’m always going back to be like, oh, did we miss this one? I really wish we had done that one, but now we’re past that year, and I don’t know if we can add it in anywhere. So I thought it was great, and you told me it was probably the first historical mystery. So seems like a no brainer that we have to include that. I was holding up the book covers, the book covers for this book are great. They’re all great. Mine is really good, and a bunch of the other ones I saw online were really good. It feels almost rhetorical to ask Carolyn because Agatha Christie is so popular, but I want to hear it as part of this Death Comes as the End review because you’re so articulate.

Carolyn Daughters  11:02

Oh, thank you.

Sarah Harrison  11:02

Why Agatha Christie?

Carolyn Daughters  11:05

No, no pressure.

Sarah Harrison  11:07

Why the author, and then why this book? Right. So Agatha Christie, someone we’ve done a number of books by, but what makes her so special?

Carolyn Daughters  11:15

Yes. A history of mystery book club could be built exclusively on Agatha Christie if desired, and there are book clubs that are and podcasts that are focused exclusively on Agatha Christie. Christie, and you can see why she is one of the queens of crime. Of the four, there are four queens of crime: Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy B. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. And arguably, Agatha Christie is at the top. She’s the pinnacle. She is the best-selling author possibly in the world, possibly after the Bible. All the different data floats around there, but She’s extremely talented, in particular with her plots. Her plots are stunning, and so the first challenge we had in building out our list. We started with Edgar Allan Poe with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and made our way. Now we’re in the 1940s. Our first challenge was how do we pick a handful of Agatha Christie books that are representative of things that are shifting and changing in the mystery form, or helping to evolve the form, instead of saying what we could easily have done, which is we’re just going to do every single Agatha Christie book, and this one because it really dips, I think, successfully into the realm of historical fiction and historical mystery, to me warranted a place in our list. There have been many historical mysteries written since, but she’s, if not the first among the first, and she does it so well. She draws from her life experience. She has been to the places where Death on the Nile is set, where this particular book is set. As part of our Death Comes as the End review, we can reveal that Agatha Christie had spent quite a bit of time in Egypt. She, at this point, was married to Max Mallowan, an archeologist. She had ideas about this book that came to her from Stephen Glanville. I think is his name. I’ll have to double check that.

Sarah Harrison  13:42

It’s Stephen Glanville.

Carolyn Daughters  13:43

Thank you. Stephen Glanville. She knew what she was talking about here, and she also had resources that she could turn to have some ideas checked. Would women have behaved this way. What would it have been like for a widow to return to her family home? How might a family have been disrupted in various ways? What was the life of a mortuary priest or a cad priest? And she got a lot of these details right, and right generally, and also right for the period, the 1940s, and the base of knowledge up to that time.

Sarah Harrison  14:26

I’m continually, I’d say, floored by just the whole Agatha Christie universe as it still exists. Right, we even had on a prominent Agatha Christie podcaster, Kemper Donovan, who hosts All About Agatha, but there’s multiple podcast folks all about Agatha Christie and conferences and remakes. By none other than Kenneth Branagh is always remaking these Agatha Christie. Novels, so she has had so much staying power. Rex Stout has a pretty active fan club. I would say Sherlock Holmes has a pretty active fan club, but I don’t think anything really holds a candle to the Agatha Christie fans out there. There are so many, and frankly, I enjoy every single book of hers that we read. I always, I to me, I don’t think it’s overdone at all. I think she is fantastic and amazing, and I’m always glad. I know I’m gonna like it when we have another Agatha Christie book. And this was no exception. So we already talked a little bit about why this one, the first historical fictional novel, and she goes way back. Like when I first started reading this, it did feel quite foreign, and I was glad I read the introduction where she’s like, “Hey, just so you know, a lot of people called their wives sisters and their husbands’ brothers, and we’re gonna do that is in keeping with how they were, and so that whole situation really threw me for a loop, and I think it took me a few chapters to get my head into the book and start reading more comfortably. How did it feel for you, Carolyn?

Carolyn Daughters  16:21

It felt both foreign and relatable every step of the way. The characters felt like they could be living, breathing characters today, and I think that that’s probably part of what Agatha Christie is doing in her writing is saying time passes and we have different settings and different customs and traditions, and yet people are people, and you bring this much conflict into a household and there’s going to be an explosion. In this case, we aren’t going to reveal who, how, when, but there is a death that occurs, and it just felt it felt masterful. Agatha Christie, outside of this Death Comes as the End review we talked a little bit about why this book is not as well-known as some others. We talked about this with Dr. Nicky Nielsen, and we talked about how a film version of a book really does give a book more staying power in many cases. Sarah, what are your thoughts? Could they make a film version of this book? Because if they did, this book would be as well-known as probably the top 10 list for for most people, I think.

Sarah Harrison  17:42

I honestly think so. I know Dr. Nielsen thought you couldn’t, but without going too much into like Egyptian curses and their place in movies, I think you could totally play that angle and make a movie out of it. I mean, I think it could be really good. She has a huge canon, so I mean, it’s not shocking why this hasn’t been one of them. Especially, I think a lot of them are detective based, right? So TV series that might be Hercule Poirot based or Miss Marple based, and this is definitely outside of that, so it doesn’t easily fit in.

Carolyn Daughters  18:27

I agree.

Sarah Harrison  18:28

But it’s still, I think, really worth reading. I was shocked how historically accurate everything was because you could still craft a story. Just, I think, shows her masterfulness in mystery writing. We don’t want to spoil it in our Death Comes as the End review, but the book is just marvelous.

Carolyn Daughters  18:45

I think after I was a couple chapters in, I started feeling like, okay, this is the ancient Egyptian version of the English country house. We have this remote setting. We have a closed circle of suspects. Everybody has a potential motive. I had trouble identifying the real killer, though Agatha Christie is super fair play. So you could figure this out, but I’m not the best at figuring this thing out.

Sarah Harrison  19:19

I think she’s so hard. That’s one of the things that always blows me away in an Agatha Christie novels, because you do have like a pretty close circle of suspects. Well, it’s got to be one of these, and then you go through all the possibilities, and you’re like, well, I don’t. It doesn’t seem like it is. Or is it? Then you just start playing mystery games. At least I do. Or I’m like, well, who’s the least likely? Because it’s got to be the least likely person, and just guessing on that rather than even anything in the book. Who’s the least likely? And she still gets me every time. I don’t think. I’ve ever once figured it out before we got there.

Carolyn Daughters  20:03

And we’ve done several. So if you’re an Agatha Christie fan, please listen to our episodes on. And Then There Were None, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The ABC Murders, Murder on the Orient Express, …

Sarah Harrison  20:19

The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Carolyn Daughters  20:23

Yes, and so this story, the psychological suspense in it, reminded me to some degree of, And Then There Were None, and also two of our more recent books, Rear Window by Cornell Woolrich and Laura by Vera Caspary, where there’s not the traditional detective solving the case, and so you’re left to your own devices as the reader without somebody helping to guide you.

Sarah Harrison  20:51

Did you have a favorite character in this book?

Carolyn Daughters  20:58

I really, really liked Esa, who is I think the grandmother. I liked her a lot, and I liked Renisemb, the young widow who returns home. If I had to pick two, I would probably say the two of them. I also liked Hori, who is the businessman who is considered part of the family, but he’s also outside the family, and he just really seemed like a stabilizing presence in that chaotic household to me.

Sarah Harrison  21:32

Yes.

Carolyn Daughters  21:32

How about you? Did you have favorites?

Sarah Harrison  21:34

Oh, definitely. Esa the grandma was my favorite, and I’m starting to notice I am always drawn to the older lady characters. They are often so quippy and quirky and wise in their ways, and she was no exception. She was a firecracker, but I think had a lot of brains in there, so I really liked what she brought. It was the same one. Died in the Wool. I ended up liking that. Although, just a total aside, they treat Flossie and Died in the Wool like a grandma.

Carolyn Daughters  22:15

She’s not a grandma.

Sarah Harrison  22:15

She’s 47, Carolyn.

Carolyn Daughters  22:18

I know she’s 47.

Sarah Harrison  22:19

And they’re like, I’m 47, and I am not. No, slow down, everyone. This is not.

Carolyn Daughters  22:31

In thinking about this Death Comes as the End review, I was reminded of Flossie Rubrick in Died in the Wool by Ngaio Marsh. She just speaks her mind. She really does, and Esa in this book also speaks her mind. She says anything that is on her mind in Death Comes as the End. Do you remember the old woman who is really quite ill in The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope by C.W. Grafton?

Sarah Harrison  23:11

Yes. Yes. That was a great book.

Carolyn Daughters  23:14

These older women characters are very snappy and witty, but they also say whatever they want to say. There’s nothing holding them back anymore, and I agree with you. I really like that kind of character.

Sarah Harrison  23:30

So hopefully more to come. Man, we are out of time for this episode, Carolyn. What are any final parting thoughts? If you’re not already reading this as part of your Agatha Christie canon, why should people be reading this book?

Carolyn Daughters  23:47

It’s Agatha Christie’s only mystery set in ancient Egypt. It’s a page turner. It’s really, really good. It’s informed historically by her own life experiences, her husband, and other friends of the family, archeologists, it’s a really accessible way to encounter the ancient world through domestic life instead of through kings and monuments and pyramids and things like this, and I think it deserves to be better known. And once they make that film version, it will be.

Sarah Harrison  24:27

They had to be holding something back after all these years. What have we not explored enough about Agatha Christie? All right. Well, we’ve tried to keep everything pretty mysterious for you guys, but we did do a two-part episode already, as we mentioned, with Dr. Nicky Nielsen, an Egyptologist who, again, also an Agatha Christie fan, also wrote his own mystery novel. So check that out. Check out his books. You can read his article. We link to it in the show notes, where he discusses in depth the artifacts that inspired the book. So I thought that Death Comes as the End review was a lot of fun. Our other episodes do contain spoilers, so get your book first, and then go listen to the episodes.

Carolyn Daughters

Thanks so much for listening to this spoiler-free, STAY MYSTERIOUS episode: The Moving Toyshop review. Please help other mystery lovers find our show by subscribing or with a like, a share, or a rating. It’s totally free, and it means the world to us.

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Carolyn Daughters

Thanks for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. Until next time, Stay Mysterious.