It's been ages since I read a Miss Marple book, so long in fact, that I think I've probably forgotten all of them. This is was a really satisfying and fun read, though I thought it dragged a bit in the middle (as detective stories tend to do), when new evidence was being collected, people were snooping around the woods and receiving anonymous phone calls and so on. I definitely didn't see the solution coming, and Christie definitely knows how to write a well-plotted and suitably (but not overly) intricate mystery. I wasn't very excited about the prospect of the first-person narration from the vicar of a tiny town, but he turned out to have a nice sense of humour and it was more interesting than I expected. Parts of it were really funny, like the Clements' trouble with their servant and the narrator's pretended bemusement as to why he married his much-younger wife. Miss Marple, of course, was great, with her delightful mixture of sweetness and super-human shrewdness masquerading as an old lady's curiosity. It's very entertaining and fun reading, but I suppose someone could fault it for treating murder a little too off-handedly and frivolously, as a blatant source of entertainment. It has none of the terrifying atmosphere of the BBC's recent Christie adaptations (which have been superb of late), and feels overall quite jolly.
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