A Caribbean Mystery (Miss Marple) by Agatha Christie

 

A Caribbean Mystery (Miss Marple)by Agatha Christie.

This edition published 2022 by Harper Collins.

From the cover of the book:

Major Palgrave enjoys an audience, and, in Miss Marple, he discovers a captive audience too polite to walk away.

But midway through recounting the tale of a multiple murder, he stops suddenly when something, or someone, catches his eye.

Then, when he’s found dead the following day, Miss Marple suspects that someone wanted to silence the talkative major. Permanently.

Never underestimate Miss Marple...

***********

Miss Marple is on holiday in foreign climes on the Caribbean island of St Honoré, and although it was rather kind of her nephew Raymond to pay for her stay at the Golden Palm resort she is actually a little bored. Nothing really seems to happen here, and Miss Marple finds herself longing for the hustle and bustle of village life back home in St Mary Mead. But some excitement is about to head her way...

During her stay, Miss Marple has frequently been the conversational target of retired Major Palgrave, and being too polite to stop him regaling her with many tales of his foreign adventures, she has learned to only half listen while he is droning on. One afternoon, when he is well into a story about a murderer, Major Palgrave is pulled up short by something that he spots over Miss Marple's shoulder and he never finishes his tale - or shows Miss Marple the photograph he claims to have in his wallet of the guilty party. Miss Marple does not concern herself too much with this unfinished tale, until Major Palgrave is found dead the very next day, apparently from natural causes. Given the nature of his last conversation with her, she cannot help but be suspicious about his untimely death -  if only she had been paying more attention to his story. Miss Marple is sure that something sinister is happening in this tropical paradise. Can she find the murderer before they strike again?

On the surface this appears to be a very nice hotel in the kind of resort that attracts respectable guests with more than a little money to spend, but scratch a little deeper and you discover that some of these people are keeping secrets that they would rather stay hidden. Major Palgrave's death sets Miss Marple thinking, and it is not long before her innocent little old lady act garners information from several guests that is very enlightening, particularly about the newly-weds Tim and Molly Kendal that have recently taken over the hotel, and the two couples who holiday together here every year Greg and Lucky Dyson and their friends Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon. 

Most entertainingly in this story, Miss Marple's ally in getting to the bottom of everyone's little secrets is not a police detective this time, but cranky old millionaire Jason Rafiel, who comes to appreciate that she is much more than she appears - being not so much a twittering old woman, but Nemesis in disguise. Together they form a formidable duo in the pursuit of justice.

This is one of my favourite Miss Marple stories, and it follows classic Christie lines by offering a likely bunch of suspects for you to cast your eye upon in search of the villain of the piece, and a host of red herrings to discard before the mystery is solved. Christie also goes to town in the way that only she can in delving into the very worst that human nature has to offer with infidelity, cold-hearted calculation, and revenge being the top of the list of factors that motivate more than one of the characters to stray from the path of righteousness. It is glorious!

As usual for my Christie stories, I alternated between the text and the audio book, which is narrated very nicely by Emilia Fox - I enjoy her narrations enormously, but am inclined to think that she is perhaps a little young for Miss Marple and would have preferred Stephanie Cole as I loved her version of At Bertram's Hotel.

This book was my August choice for the #ReadChristie2022 Challenge for the prompt a story which is 'Set in a hot climate'. 

A Caribbean Mystery is available to buy now in multiple formats.

About the author:

Born in Torquay in 1890, Agatha Christie began writing during the First World War and wrote over 100 novels, plays and short story collections. She was still writing to great acclaim until her death, and her books have now sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in over 100 foreign languages. Yet Agatha Christie was always a very private person, and though Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple became household names, the Queen of Crime was a complete enigma to all but her closest friends.