![]() It's an interesting-enough read, at the end of the day, but the "cold case" feels very cold, and Miss Marple herself really could have slept through this one. ![]() On the downside, there aren't all that many suspects and - unlike later efforts, such as "Five Little Pigs" - the 18-year-old murder remains firmly in the past, affecting the present only through the fear of retribution, never through a human element. Also, when Christie wrote this in the early '40s, she must have been enticed by the idea of the retrospective novel: many of her later efforts - often brilliant, often not - would tackle long-dead murders. For some reason, Marple novels always work better when she has a sidekick of sorts, although here you could really call Marple the sidekick, as Gwenda does a good deal of the investigation. This book is quite middle-of-the-line but has a lot going for it: the central character, for instance, is intriguing, and fairly haunted by the things she discovers. As a result, the various recurring characters in Jane Marple's life don't really seem to have aged properly, and it seems best to treat this as a flashback, rather than - as the book's subtitle would inform us - "Miss Marple's Last Case". ![]() ![]() "Sleeping Murder" was written during World War II and - along with the more explicitly-final Poirot novel "Curtain" - placed in a bank vault, to be opened only when Christie was either deceased, or too old to write any more. In which a young woman's haunting memories lead her on the trail of a murder from the far distant past. ![]()
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