And Then There Were None

And Then There Were None is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, published in 1939, in which ten strangers, each secretly responsible for a death for which the law never punished them, are lured to an isolated mansion on Soldier Island off the English coast by a mysterious host who never appears. A recording accuses each guest of their hidden crime, and the guests are then killed one by one in a sequence that matches the verses of a children's counting rhyme displayed in each bedroom, with the number of figurines on the dining table decreasing to match, as the survivors realize the killer must be one of them and the island offers no means of escape or rescue. Christie constructed the novel as a tightly engineered closed-circle puzzle with no detective character to guide the reader, instead building suspense purely through the guests' mutual suspicion and dwindling number, and only revealing the murderer's identity and method in a confession left behind after all ten are dead. Widely regarded as Christie's masterpiece and one of the best-selling novels ever published, And Then There Were None is credited with establishing the isolated-location, everyone-is-a-suspect structure that became a defining subgenre of crime fiction.