I am a day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes. This was the October book for my Agatha Christie reading group and I did start on Halloween but flaked out before I could finish it. Besides which I was enjoying it too much to hurry and I was under the erroneous impression that I might actually be able to finger the murderer this time. Foolish person that I am! I have the niggling feeling that I have seen the initial scene in some other venue: Elspeth McGillicuddy is on the 4:50 train, which is passed by another train in which she witnesses a man strangling a woman to death. Elspeth arrives on Miss Marple's doorstep convinced that she has been written off by the authorities as a tiresome old lady.
I always enjoy a Marple mystery and this outing adds the remarkable Lucy Eyelesbarrow to Christie's stable of wonderful characters. Of course Miss Marple recruits the younger woman to do her foot work. Searching for corpses is a young woman's game. Lucy can run a stately home like nobody's business and poke through the grounds in her spare time. Miss Marple has used her own resources to procure a map, to ride the same route, and deduce where the dead woman has likely been disposed of. Lucy will be responsible for ground-truthing her theory.
Lucy finagles a job in Rutherford Hall and soon has the whole family (and especially the men folk) eating out of her hand. Once the body is revealed, more mischief happens. Every time I had a suspect in my sights, Christie bumped them off! Also entertaining were the many proposals that Lucy receives along the way. Christie quite cruelly refused to finger the lucky man who wins Lucy (or if one of them manages that task), but she revealed the murderer clearly.
I do wish Lucy had more time to spend with Inspector Craddock, if she had to choose any of these louts!
This is book number 24 of my Read Your Hoard Challenge.
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