Book #108 of 2024: Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie This Agatha Christie collection, published posthumously in 1979, turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, as all nine of its assembled stories are ones that had been previously collected in decades past: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories …
Continue reading “Book Review: Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie”
Book #97 of 2024: Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #12) More or less the end of author Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series, published posthumously in 1976 although written and set several decades beforehand. (It would be followed by one final short story anthology a few years later, collecting tales …
Continue reading “Book Review: Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie”
Book #52 of 2024: Nemesis by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #12) This 1971 title was the last Miss Marple novel that author Agatha Christie ever wrote, although Sleeping Murder, published posthumously in 1976, was the final entry in the series to be released. It functions as a fairly direct sequel to #9 A Caribbean Mystery, …
Book #122 of 2023: At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #11) This… is not a mystery. It’s not even a spy thriller or an in-depth character study, two other genres where author Agatha Christie dabbles on occasion. Instead it’s the story of a police inspector immediately suspecting an outlandish criminal conspiracy involving the …
Continue reading “Book Review: At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie”
Book #111 of 2023: A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #10) I always find it somewhat absurd when one of author Agatha Christie’s detective characters simply happens to stumble over a murder, but this premise has to be in the running for among her most ludicrous. Whilst on vacation, Miss Marple talks to …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie”
Book #88 of 2023: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #9) This 1962 novel, published in the U.S. as simply The Mirror Crack’d, offers a fun little murder mystery that’s kept me guessing throughout. No one seems to have had any motive that could account for the neighborhood woman’s …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie”
Book #77 of 2023: Double Sin and Other Stories by Agatha Christie An odd little collection, published in 1961 (and then only in the US) but including stories from as far back as 1925. Three of the eight entries had even been previously released in other Agatha Christie volumes — “The Last Seance” in 1933’s …
Continue reading “Book Review: Double Sin and Other Stories by Agatha Christie”
Book #55 of 2023: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées by Agatha Christie The criteria for inclusion in author Agatha Christie’s short story collections is often somewhat haphazard, and in the case of this 1960 publication, it turns out that I’ve read four of the six entries elsewhere already (or …
Book #22 of 2023: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #8) A most delightful little mystery. I enjoy how author Agatha Christie plays with her usual formulae in this one, while still treating readers fairly with the facts and sticking firmly within the grand whodunnit tradition. As suggested by the novel’s rather exclamatory …
Continue reading “Book Review: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie”
Book #166 of 2022: A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #7) Another standard and somewhat forgettable / interchangeable Agatha Christie mystery, taking its title from the old nursery rhyme about the four and twenty blackbirds. As usual with this author, those lines of doggerel are soon linked with a series of …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more