[2] The novel features the recurring character of Colonel Race for his last appearance to solve the mysterious deaths of a married couple, exactly one year apart.

A few days after the one-year anniversary of Rosemary's death, the dinner is held, ostensibly to celebrate Iris's eighteenth birthday.

Iris confesses to Anthony that, after George's death, she discovered cyanide in her purse, making it appear that the murderer was attempting to frame her.

Anthony realizes that Iris was the intended victim, not George, and Ruth was conspiring with Victor Drake (who she hoped to marry) to ensure he would inherit the family money.

When the group left the table to dance, Iris dropped her bag; a young waiter, retrieving it, misplaces it at the seat adjacent to hers.

Her last attempt at killing Iris is to knock her unconscious in her bedroom, then turn on the fireplace gas, and leave the house.

The plot of this novel is an expansion of a Hercule Poirot short story entitled "Yellow Iris,"[citation needed] previously published the Strand Magazine in July 1937.

Maurice Richardson, writing in The Observer in 1936 stated,Agatha Christie readers are divided into two groups: first, fans like me who will put up with any amount of bamboozling for the sake of the pricking suspense, the close finish, six abreast, of the suspect race, and the crashing chord of the trick solution; second, knockers who complain it isn't cricket and anyway there's nothing to it.Fans, I guarantee will be quite happy with Sparkling Cyanide, a high income group double murder, first of wayward smarty Rosemary, second of dull husband George at his lunatic reconstruction-of-the-crime party.

"[7] In 1983, CBS writers Robert Malcolm Young, Sue Grafton and Steven Humphrey adapted the book into a television film, directed by Robert Michael Lewis, set in modern day California and starring Anthony Andrews as the central character, Tony Browne, with Deborah Raffin as Iris Murdoch, Pamela Bellwood as Ruth Lessing, Josef Sommer as George Barton, David Huffman and June Chadwick as Stephen and Sandra Farraday, Nancy Marchand as Lucilla Drake, and Christine Belford as Rosemary Barton.

[citation needed] In 1993, the short story that served as the basis for this novel, The Yellow Iris, was adapted for television by Anthony Horowitz and directed by Peter Barber-Fleming in an episode of the ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet.

[citation needed] In late 2003, the work was loosely adapted by Laura Lamson for ITV1, again in a modern setting, and involving a football manager's wife's murder.

][citation needed] In 2013, Sparkling Cyanide was adapted as an episode of the French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie.

[citation needed] In 2012, a three-part adaptation by Joy Wilkinson was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 directed by Mary Peate, with Naomi Frederick as Iris, Amanda Drew as Ruth, Colin Tierney as Anthony, James Lailey as Stephen, Sean Baker as Colonel Race and Jasmine Hyde as Rosemary.