Title: Crooked House
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Paul Kresse
Yours for: SOLD! (10/10/10)
Best things about this cover:
- Extreme Close-Up!
- The needle—beautifully rendered, with fantastic detail. Has an apparent weightiness and heft, a solidity, that makes it really stand out. The indentation of needle on skin is a wicked little touch. Nice.
- The talons—nothing accentuates a hypo cover like sexy/sinister blood red nails.
- I guess "Crooked House" is a more mass-market-friendly title than "Granddad's Heroin Addiction"
Best things about this back cover:
- Well, there's one "Who?" for each of the listed suspects, but somehow piling them up in a line there at the end diminishes their rhetorical effect / makes the imagined narrator sound like a psychotic owl.
- Someone named her child "Clemency?" "And this is my brother, Parole, and my sister, NoloContendere."
- Most enigmatic description I've seen in a while: "Death meant something special to weak-looking Laurence." With that kind of set-up, Laurence better be a carrion-devouring zombie or I'm going to be Very disappointed.
"My dear Sophia, do you really think an old gentleman of over eighty is the best judge of a child's welfare?"
Judging by the cover, grampa's got bigger problems than being 80.
~RP
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