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Disappointed? Underwhelmed? Both. I was considering to strip it of yet another star, but figured it's decent enough to merit an above-average verdict, but there it stops.
There is a tedious predictability in having the hero of a series put under extremely hostile conditions impossible to get out of, and then getting out, in a deus ex machina kind of way at that. If you've created a character who can do anything, why destroy the illusion (because, come on - that's what it's all about) by having a Black Hawk coming out of the sky and saving him at the last moment?
The writing seems instrumental in a strange way: with some attention towards displaying the author's knowledge of intricate details of weaponry and vodka distillation techniques, and yet he manages to give one of the male villains a feminine name form (Setyeyiva), probably because it looks and sounds exotic.
Meh.

I really wanted to like this one. For once, a Christie novel starts with people of flesh and bone, people one can like, relate to, identify with, etc. And then there is Christie's own statement that while other books may have been day-at-the-office affairs, this one was a labour of love.
Well... I really didn't like it. Whatever charm and promise the first couple of chapters had in terms of character depiction, soon vanished into ordinary Christie coolness, the plot never seemed real, the philosophical undercurrents - that one can always justify a Christie novel by: those semi-explicit considerations about what is truth, human nature, knowledge, good, etc. - this time were non-existent or just uninteresting. Oh, and the murderer was completely made-up, and for the first time, I had guessed it almost from the start, which is not a good sign, since I'm notoriously bad at guessing.
Was it a waste of time? Well, the first chapter was great.

This one is hard to rate. In terms of deception, it's up there among the cleverest of her novels. I had actually just read A Talent to Deceive which goes through the devices she uses, so I knew there was something strange - as in Ackroyd-strange, genre-rule-bending - about who the murderer was, and yet I was completely fooled - as always.
And the epistemological point about the little things that are unnecessary and therefore become meaningful once the narrative is seen from the right angle, is both ingenious and ultimately the reason why Poirot is the greatest crime fiction character of all times.
But the flaws... The psychologising mumbo jumbo in the final Poirot speech; the over-abundance of false identities; and worst of all: the implausibility of (a) the extremely complicated setup at the murder scene, and (b) Poirot's very detailed knowledge of the exact details, which he could not have known or deduced, at least not from what information we are given in the book.
So: at the same time one of her strongest and weakest efforts. Hence the three stars.