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Notes -
What you're describing is precisely the reaction I had to the first Christie novel I read, Death in the Clouds. The summation didn't have me thinking "oh my God, the answer was staring me in the face all along, how did I fail to cop it?"; it had me thinking "well, sure, I guess that makes sense, sort of, if you say so". I felt like the killer could have turned out to be a completely different person and I would have found the ending exactly as satisfying, which is to say, not very.
By contrast, when I read my second Christie novel And Then There Were None, the summation seemed ingenious and completely logical, and I felt like there were enough clues that a sufficiently attentive reader could have figured it out well in advance. All that in addition to being a more genuinely terrifying work of fiction than most horror novels and stories I've read.
I think anyone with an output on Christie’s level is going to have (many) misses. But at her best she’s a genuinely great writer with a great skill at concise characterization.
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