As Miss Marple basks in the Caribbean sunshine, the warmth easing her rheumatism, she feels mildly discontented that in paradise, nothing ever happens. When a garrulous old soldier tells her of a murderer who got away with it, she is intrigued, but before he can show her a snapshot, the Major is interrupted—fatally. This handsome new edition of the 1964 classic should be in everyone's mystery library. The star of a dozen novels and twenty short stories, the shrewd and curious Jane Marple was inspired by Agatha Christie's grandmother and her cronies in the leafy London suburb of Ealing. Miss Marple's independent mind and acute sense of human nature—not unlike Christie's own—have made her an enduring prototype in detective fiction.

"She tells the reader explicitly what is going to happen; and yet when it does, nine out of ten will be taken completely by surprise—as I was. How does she do it?"—Francis Iles