I’ve complained in some of my reviews of these modern Miss Marple stories (see, for example, here and here) about how they don’t provide any clues to even base a guess on as to whodunit. I didn’t think this one did either, but I still didn’t have any trouble figuring out what was going on. This was because of a couple of external clues.

The first is that in her pocket bio at the back of the book (which I read first), Natalie Haynes is described as a writer and broadcaster who “tours the world speaking on the modern relevance of the classical world” and who has written two books that were “retellings of Greek myth.” This alerts you to the relevance of the epiphany Miss Marple experiences when she has to unravel her work knitting a baby blanket. And throwing in a reference to a high school production of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (“wives murdering husbands”) was another waving red flag. Because I don’t think many high schools were putting that play on, even back in the day.

The bigger clue for me though came from the fact that I’d read The Return of Martin Guerre, which was the far more obvious literary allusion being made. Add the fact that the suspects were all members of the same family and things seemed pretty obvious, and the question of whoever pulled the trigger (or loosed the arrow) was just by the way.

A decent read that has some fun with a bizarre murder in a cozy village setting. Not a great mystery, but few of Christie’s Marple stories were either.

Marple index