Marple and a few detectives latch onto a circle of suspects at a nearby seaside hotel, dig into their backgrounds, and a seemingly fruitless investigation meanders for a hundred pages as it’s established that everyone has an air tight alibi. This is a Miss Marple novel – only the second that I’ve read – and I have to say that nothing really stood out about it until the ending. Things do look a bit grim for the man of the house, as it’s immediately assumed that someone knocked off his mistress. The owners of the estate are shocked to discover the corpse, as they both claim they’ve never seen the girl before. I can now confirm to you that the body in Christie’s novel is indeed found in the reading room of a country house, and not a building of the book lending variety. I’ve read enough British books from the era to know better, but for some reason my mind always goes there. It may be the American in me, but whenever I hear “body in the library”, I always imagine a murder victim found in a town’s public library. But that’s kind of cool, because I have an early 1940s novel by an author in her prime, and I know next to nothing about it. I somehow have the impression that it’s one of the quintessential Christie novels, which makes no sense because I don’t recall anyone really talking about it. For some reason The Body in the Library is one of the Christie book titles that stands out the most in my mind, although I’m not even sure that I’ve read a review of it.
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