It's an interesting-enough read, at the end of the day, but the 'cold case' feels very cold, and Miss Marple herself really could have slept through this one. On the downside, there aren't all that many suspects and - unlike later efforts, such as 'Five Little Pigs' - the 18-year-old murder remains firmly in the past, affecting the present only through the fear of retribution, never through a human element. Also, when Christie wrote this in the early '40s, she must have been enticed by the idea of the retrospective novel: many of her later efforts - often brilliant, often not - would tackle long-dead murders. For some reason, Marple novels always work better when she has a sidekick of sorts, although here you could really call Marple the sidekick, as Gwenda does a good deal of the investigation.

This book is quite middle-of-the-line but has a lot going for it: the central character, for instance, is intriguing, and fairly haunted by the things she discovers. As a result, the various recurring characters in Jane Marple's life don't really seem to have aged properly, and it seems best to treat this as a flashback, rather than - as the book's subtitle would inform us - 'Miss Marple's Last Case'. 'Sleeping Murder' was written during World War II and - along with the more explicitly-final Poirot novel 'Curtain' - placed in a bank vault, to be opened only when Christie was either deceased, or too old to write any more. In which a young woman's haunting memories lead her on the trail of a murder from the far distant past.

Miss marple's last case