This was another solid mystery.
I really love Miss Marple. I think she is absolutely adorable and also sharp as a tack, and it is great fun to watch everyone underestimate her while she ties knots around them. Watching her start to really feel and sound old in this novel was very hard, though. I am genuinely horrified that the next in the series is subtitled "Miss Marple's Last Mystery," because I can't quite feel that she is just going to retire.
I loved that this started without her even being clear what the murder mystery actually was. Watching her attempt to piece that together slowly and carefully, trusting her glorious instincts all the while was a great joy.
I appreciated the several classical references (one obviously being the title, though that has appeared before in the series). I liked that this was very definitely connected to a previous novel in the series, which I don't really feel like I saw that often. Although I have been reading them in order, it didn't fell truly necessary until this book.
As always, I was just barely beginning to realize "whodunnit" when things wrapped up. Miss Marple has always been quicker on the uptake than I. Sometimes I wonder if maybe taking pauses between chapters would help me to piece things together, but these are never long novels and I find them very hard to put down once I have started them. I guess I have one more time to attempt that approach before the series is over!
If you are looking to pick up an Agatha Christie story for the first time, this is probably not the one to start with given a previous mystery (A Caribbean Mystery, in case you are curious) has chunks of it given away during the course of this novel. But it is a well-written continuation of a series I am not quite ready to see end.
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