Rating: 
Summary: typical agatha christie's book
Review: it seems that this mystery got a necessary flavour to become a good movie ever...full of melodramatic elements entangles with murder and the characters are all believable....a necessary ingredients to become a good movie..but the mystery is just so and so only....
Rating:
Summary: Review
Review: Mrs. Christie set out to write a novel-and she succeeded. The characters who populate the typical country-house 'The Hollow' are vivid and believable, motivated by love, jealousy, hatred or despair-but handled in a unique manner. The most important character is the victim, Dr. John Christow, whose death is the centre point of the romantic triangles amongst the eccentric Angkatell family, and who is linked with three women, all in love with him, but in very different ways: his wife, Gerda; his mistress, Henrietta Savernake; and his former fiancée, Veronica Cray. Naturally, the motive is jealousy, but the themes of love and jealousy are superbly handled.The detective story elements are not, however, Christie's best. The murder is quite simple-the murderer is obvious, but the circumstances, involving several guns and a painting of Ygdrasil, are inexplicable-and the entire thing is a reworking of LORD EDGWARE DIES. Poirot is very much in the background, acting only as a deus ex machina at the end-it was a mistake, Christie later felt, to have him in the book. The result: a beautiful yet somewhat flawed masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: really fine writing
Review: One of the best books of Christie's long and varied career has perhaps as well one of her most heartbreaking resolutions. You almost can't wait for the victim to be done away with at the same time, you feel for their murderer. Not easy to pull off ( making the killer sympathetic) but AC does it flawlessly. This ranks right up there in her top twenty.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good, but....
Review: OOh, this is actually a very good book to read. I have to agree with some other readers that the book started off very slow. What I like about the book, however, is that Agatha Christie used a very different approach to write this particular piece of work. Nice job. Hercule Poirot actually isnt the spot light in the story. You will not find the usual Hercule Poirot, who like to use his "grey cell" to put the crime scene back together. If you are looking for a typical Poirot's advanture, you'll be disappointed. =)
Rating:
Summary: Character is Solution
Review: Superb. The characterizations are much deeper than is usual in Christie, and to a great extent, it is character that leads to the solution here. There are clues, of course, but it is in reading the dialogue and the characters' thoughts that we have the best chance at solving the puzzle. It is true that Poirot is a bit superfluous here; the story works equally well without him (Christie removed him when she wrote the play), but if his presence does not add anything, neither does it detract from the effect of this unusually constructed and deeply moving story.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite Poirot
Review: The Hollow is an affecting and taut mystery in which the best of the Poirot novel elements are happily combined. The characters are among her most developed and she does her usual good job of demonstrating the impact of the changing post-war society on their personalities. Their motivations are murky, and none of them are particularly innocent. The moral ambiguity that characterizes this book adds a dose of depth that some of the lesser Christie novels lack.
Also titled as Murder After Hours in some editions. Recommended for Christie fans, or mystery fans new to her work.
Rating:
Summary: The subplots are more affecting than the main storyline.
Review: THE HOLLOW is one of Agatha Christie's best postwar thrillers when she seemed to be trying out a new style of close psychological observation, a very delicate kind of character portrayal that was a carryover from her "straight novels" written under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Another good example of this postwar style would be TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.
I loved the story of Henrietta, one of Christie's few female visual artists, ruthless and driven, like Amyas Crale in FIVE LITTLE PIGS, always sacrificing everything to the good of their art, even their most basic human relationships. Over and over again Christie uses this theme, and I suspect she must have somehow identified herself with this driven artist figure.
The other story that is so appealing is the love story of Midge Hardcastle, the "poor relation" of the Angkatell family, who gets to spend her weekends and holidays at the family mansion, but when the weekend's over, she has to go back to her life of genteel poverty selling clothes for a fashionable modiste who values her only for her society connections. No matter how many times I read THE HOLLOW, my throat clenches up when I reach the richly satisfying end of the book, when poor Midge gets her Cinderella wishes granted. It's very affecting, just like the end of AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN.
Veronica Craye is very good too. Obviously Christie was using the real life Veronica Lake as the model for Craye, just as in the 1960s she used the real life Gene Tierney for the actress in THE MIRROR CRACK'D.
All in all, a book filled with wonderful female characters. Though the men aren't bad either!
Rating:
Summary: Probably the best Christie
Review: This book is very different from other Christie's book and is much better. For once, her characters are not simple caricatures easy to forget. They have real, deep feelings, they suffer, and the reader believe in that. The book acts like a charm that makes the reader enter in it deeper than in other Christie's work. The mystery plot is surprising but not really important. What is important is the picture of three or four key characters (only women, by the way). That makes this book closer to PD James work. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books ever written
Review: This book was beautiful. The characters are incredibly compelling and the relationship between them and their own inner-personality is so inspiring... you must read it... I'm at lost for words.
Rating:
Summary: the best
Review: This is really the best AC novel. The characters are frightening real. Especialy Lady Lucy, Gerda Christow and Henrietta Savernake, the leading ladies in this novel. The plot is surprising, though not very superb. But this book isn't a whodunnit, but a real novel. Absolutely worth reading!!
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