A Murder is Announced is the fifth murder mystery novel in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series.
From the summary on the back cover of the book, I knew it sounded like an interesting plot, and nothing I’d read before.
It took a few chapters for me to really get into it, but after that, I read the entire book in one day.
Agatha Christie, dubbed “The Queen of Mystery,” has been hit or miss with me. While I loved her novel And Then There Were None, others (like Murder in the Orient Express) weren’t captivating to me, and I either finished them purely because I was already so far in, or I shut and re-sold the books to local shops. Going into this novel, I knew that the latter would be a possibility, but luckily, this novel captured my full attention.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries are very different from her Hercule Poirot mysteries, and my preference is definitively Miss Marple. The character is certainly interesting; what appears to be a bumbling, frazzled elderly woman, is actually an acute mind with an eye for murder!
When an announcement for a murder appears in the local newspaper, the town of Chipping Cleghorn become intrigued; one after the next, they show up at the time and place listed in the paper.
What they assume to be a game quickly becomes a harsh reality when shots are fired and a man is killed. Everyone’s story is different, yet somehow just the same, and the detective on the case is convinced a killer is still on the loose–even before more bodies begin to pop up.
Out of ten stars, I’d rate this novel a seven point five. It’s absolutely worth a read, even if you’re not a huge fan of Agatha Christie’s previous works.
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