Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Is it quite all right for Megan to stay on with us for a bit?” I asked. “It’s company for Joanna – she’s rather lonely sometimes with none of her own friends.”
Having been a bit grumpy about some of the recent Agatha Christie books that I have read, I felt that this 1942 novel played very fair with the reader. We are in a country village, one of her favourite settings; residents are receiving poison pen letters, and then the deaths begin; the clues are in fact all there, but there is some very entertaining misdirection before Miss Marple arrives near the end to sort it all out (with some unusually intelligent and helpful local police, by Christie standards); and there are a couple of excruciatingly toe-curling romances along the way. And the actual solution turns out to be terribly simple, which is way more satisfying than complex murderous schemes that need everything to go perfectly according to schedule. One of the better ones. You can get The Moving Finger here.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | Death in the Clouds | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | The Moving Finger | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party
