Sparkling Cyanide

Sparkling Cyanide is a detective novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, published in the United States by Dodd, Mead in February 1945 under the title Remembered Death and in Britain by the Collins Crime Club in December of the same year. It includes the last appearance of the recurring character Colonel Race.

A year before the book begins, seven people sat down to dinner at a restaurant in London. One of them, Rosemary Barton, collapsed and died after drinking champagne that had been laced with cyanide, and the coroner ruled it a suicide, attributing it to the depression that followed an illness. The novel concerns what that verdict left unexplored, because the people at the table all had something to gain from her death. Her sister Iris stood to inherit the money if Rosemary died before her, her husband George had found a letter to another man and knew his wife intended to leave him, and other guests had their own reasons that the police never had cause to test.

Christie expanded the book from an earlier short story of hers, and the arrangement of the second dinner, with the same guests and the same empty chair, gives the mystery its shape from the first page.