What book is A Haunting in Venice based on, who's the killer in the new Poirot movie and is the ending different to the Agatha Christie novel?

You might be tempted to read the novel A Haunting in Venice is based on but there are major changes.

If you’ve been tempted to find out how to watch Shetland thanks to the show’s suspenseful stories and atmospheric setting then A Haunting in Venice captures a similar sense of eeriness and mystery. This is the third in Kenneth Branagh’s movie adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels and is set in Venice on Halloween night. Legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finds himself at the centre of a new case as a storm prevents escape from a palazzo owned by retired opera singer Rowena Drake. One murder at the house starts it all and Poirot is determined rationality should prevail in a world of superstition.

Here we reveal what book A Haunting in Venice is based on, who the killer is and how the ending differs from the Agatha Christie novel.

*Warning: spoilers ahead*

What book is A Haunting in Venice based on? 

Unlike Kenneth Branagh’s previous two Hercule Poirot movies, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, which are both based on books of the same name by Agatha Christie, the new Poirot movie is not. A Haunting in Venice which landed on Disney Plus on 22nd November is based on an Agatha Christie book called Hallowe’en Party which was released in 1969. This is stated at the end of the opening credits of the A Haunting in Venice film and it might be considered a lesser-known Agatha Christie novel.

However, anyone hoping to immerse themselves in the great mystery writer’s original storytelling in Hallowe’en Party after watching the new Poirot movie might find themselves a little confused. 

A Haunting in Venice is only very loosely based on this Agatha Christie novel, taking several character names and the Halloween timeframe from the original book but making a significant number of major changes elsewhere. 

This includes switching the location to the titular Venice in Italy rather than the fictional Woodleigh Common in England. Thankfully, though, the killer in A Haunting in Venice does ultimately remain the same, albeit with some huge twists as we saw with the Death in the Nile plot vs the book.

Who’s the killer in A Haunting in Venice? 

The identity of the killer in A Haunting in Venice is the one thing fans of Hallowe’en Party might have been expecting in the new Poirot movie as Rowena Drake is unmasked as the murderer just as she is in the novel. In the Kenneth Branagh film Rowena is a retired opera singer whose daughter Alicia drowned after apparently jumping to her death from a balcony after her chef fiancé Maxime Gerard broke off their engagement. 

It turns out Rowena was also responsible for Alicia’s death as she had been an incredibly protective and possessive mother who was determined not to lose her daughter to Gerard. 

When she found out about their engagement she’d destroyed her roof garden in a rage and gone to Istanbul alone. She brought back a species of rhododendron and re-planted it when she returned after Gerard and Alicia’s relationship was over.

Rowena was so terrified that Gerard would make things up with Alicia that she kept serving her supposedly soothing cups of tea with honey made by the bees in the garden. Poirot cleverly deduced that the rhododendrons had hallucinogenic properties, meaning the honey also had this in it and Alicia was being drugged. She kept seeing visions and hearing voices, but one night Rowena was persuaded by the housekeeper Olga Seminoff to take a break from Alicia’s bedside. 

When Alicia woke in fear, Olga did what Rowena always did and gave her honey tea, but this meant Alicia overdosed and died. Rowena knew what had happened when she came back to the bedroom and covered it up by scratching a sign that tied in with an old superstition into Alicia’s back and throwing her from the balcony into the water below.

Putting his iconic “little grey cells” to the test, Poirot explained this all to Rowena and the other characters and deduced that she’d received a blackmail letter that had led her to commit the other two murders too. She thought that it had been the psychic medium Joyce Reynolds who had sent the blackmail note that was wiping out her money because during a séance she’d revealed way too much personal information about Alicia.

This unnerved Rowena, so she attempted to drown what she thought was Joyce (actually Poirot, hallucinating thanks to drinking honeyed tea) in the apple bobbing bowl from the Halloween party earlier that night. He was wearing Joyce’s hood and mask, but after realising her mistake she’d slipped away and pushed Joyce to her death off a balcony. 

Then Rowena began to suspect that she’d got it wrong and that the family doctor, Dr Leslie Ferrier, had worked out what she’d done to Alicia. After he was locked in her virtually soundproof music room for his own safety, she called him on the internal phone line and threatened his son Leopold’s life if he didn’t impale himself on a sword on display in the room. 

He did this and it looked like another impossible crime. After being exposed Rowena ran and ended up falling off the same balcony as Alicia in what looked like a ghostly act of vengeance but could’ve simply been an accident. It later emerged that Leopold had been the blackmailer all along and had been saving her money to put towards his father’s medical bills. 

Is the A Haunting in Venice ending different to the book? 

Just like the rest of the new Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice’s ending is drastically different to the Agatha Christie book it’s based on. In the novel, Rowena Drake isn’t an opera singer and she has two children and lives in her wealthy late aunt’s beautiful home with a garden tended to by obsessive perfectionist gardener Michael Garfield. The two pretended to hate each other but were actually having an affair and teamed up to get access to the aunt’s money and home.

Michael had killed the aunt, but not before she’d made a codicil, disinheriting Rowena and favouring Olga Seminoff, an au pair.

Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie | £13.75 at Amazon

Discover the original Agatha Christie story that inspired A Haunting in Venice. A Halloween party descends into murder and mayhem for Hercule Poirot who must solve the crime before it's too late.

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They managed to get Leslie Ferrier - a solicitor’s clerk in the novel and not a doctor - to make a new codicil that looked like it was a clumsy forgery which they swapped, making Olga look like she had faked her claim. They then killed both Leslie and Olga, but Michael’s illegitimate daughter Miranda had witnessed the hiding of Olga’s body.

She’d told the story to another child, Joyce Reynolds (whose name was given to the psychic in the movie) who pretended to have been the one to see this. She told everyone she’d seen a murder at the Halloween party at Rowena’s house and Rowena had drowned the child in the apple bobble bucket to keep her quiet.

Joyce’s brother Leopold saw her coming out of the library after killing Joyce and blackmailed her, only to be killed himself. Rowena genuinely believed Michael loved her, but Poirot revealed he’d only been helping her because he wanted the money to buy a Greek island of his own and create his own idyllic garden paradise there.

Michael was obsessed with beauty and disliked fading beauty and it was because of her fear of him that Miranda’s mother Judith had left him without telling him she was pregnant. He’d worked out Miranda was his child after coming to Woodleigh Common and had been preparing to sacrifice her to silence her when Poirot and the police intervened and caught him.

So ultimately, Rowena’s identity as the killer in A Haunting in Venice did remain accurate to the book - although Michael as an accomplice was removed completely. The motivation, setting and characters were largely all changed and perhaps it was simply considered a little too grizzly to include the original deaths of two children in the film.

How to watch Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile 

Now you know what A Haunting in Venice is based on and how it differs from the book, you might also be tempted to re-watch Kenneth Branagh’s other Poirot movies or discover them for the first time. Like A Haunting in Venice which is the third to be made chronologically, the other movies are also available to watch via a Disney Plus subscription in the UK.