If a dead body falls in the woods, and no one hears it. . . .

I do love Miss Marple. She’s plucky and clever, and the nosiest old lady ever.

In this one, a friend of Miss Marple’s thinks she has seen a man strangling a woman on a train. Not her train, but on a train going in the opposite direction. The cops can’t find a body, and no one believes the friend. So of course Miss Marple figures it out. She starts poking around with train timetables, maps, all kinds of stuff like that, and she determines where (if anywhere) the body would have ended up. Unfortunately, she can’t just go traipsing about trying to find dead bodies or murderers, so she enlists the help of a young friend. Miss Marple actually sends someone in undercover to uncover (sorry) the crime.

So Lucy Eyelesbarrow goes undercover in the Crackenthorpe house as a housekeeper, and meets all of the eccentric characters there. She snoops around the house and grounds, finding clues and reporting back to Miss M, who is of course putting everything together. Things get complicated, so I’m not even going to tell you about all of the other characters, because there are just too many, and I don’t want you trying to guess who did it. Or why.

The thing with Agatha Christie is that once you figure out the formula, then it’s pretty easy to guess who did it, at least most of the time. The whys and wherefores might be a bit odd, but it’s still fun trying to figure it all out.