#missmarple — Public Fediverse posts

Miss Marple is back! Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley #BookReview

Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel is a new murder mystery with Miss Marple as detective, written by Lucy Foley.

Miss Marple and Mrs. Bantry (Dolly) go on an holiday to a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps. And, of course, murder happens!

There were many things I liked about the book. If you read Agatha Christie, you are in for a treat: you will spot many references to other Christie books. I think these references combined with descriptions and dialogues of Miss Marple give Christie’s readers a sense of familiarity and known territory. If you are new to Miss Marple, these references will help you by giving you context to the characters.

I think the choice of the setting is really impressive, not (only) because a more or less isolated place can turn into a closed circle with the possibility of snowstorms, that we recognise from other Christie’s books, but more so because Lucy Foley decided to put Miss Marple in a setting that feels much more like James Bond, which give us something new to the character: we know this frail, old lady is much tougher than she looks, but how will she navigate a so different setting?

I did guess some things about some of the characters, but did not guess the murderer (bonus points to Foley!). I must confess that I probably got too invested in the story because at some point I was rooting for one of the characters to be the murderer, thinking it could be (another) wonderful homage to Christie. Still, I appreciated more the twists and turns.

I noticed Foley was careful in tying the loose ends, which is something important for me in this type of story. During the reading, there will be information that can be clues or not and at the end it is important to go back and explain them, it does not need to be “Poirot revealing the murderer in a room with all the suspects”, a Christie trademark, but it needs to be done and it is something that adds up to the comfort of reading.

The book starts in a slower pace, but will get quicker and with more action towards the end, so don’t let that put you off.

Except for the short story in “Marple, Twelve New Stories“, titled “Evil in Small Places” and one of my favourites, I didn’t read other books by Lucy Foley, but I did like her writing style. The only thing that didn’t work as well for me was the structure: each chapter is narrated by a different character in the present tense, which makes you feel like the scene is developing in front of your eyes, almost like a film. Maybe this could bring younger generations of readers to the Miss Marple world (that would be awesome), but for old Christie re-readers like me it felt a little bit too different.

The book will be out on the 8th of September and we can already pre-order it. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance reading copy.