Miss Marple’s Final Cases (Miss Marple Mysteries)

by Agatha Christie

Volume 78 in The Agatha Christie Classic Collection (1979).
Limited edition of 1000 copies worldwide

First, the mystery man in the church with a bullet-wound… then, the riddle of a dead man’s buried treasure… the curious conduct oif a caretaker after a fatal riding accident… the corpse and a tape-measure… the girl framed for theft… and the suspect accused of stabbing his wife with a dagger.

Six gripping cases with one thing in common – the astonishing deductive powers of Miss Marple.

Also includes two non-Marple mysteries, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’.

• ISBN10: 0002315963
• ISBN13: 9780002315968
• Publish Date: 1 September 2003 (first published 26 April 1993)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 29 June 2006
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
• Imprint: HarperCollins
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 160
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[Cameron Trost]

An entertaining collection of Marple cases but certainly not Christie's best work. Some of the mysteries are underdeveloped or written in such a way that the reader isn't effectively encouraged or given the tools to speculate as to just what is going on.

[brokentune]

Ideal bed time reading - the stories are written well enough to draw you in, but are short and formulaic enough to not keep you up all night guessing what happened next.

Some of the stories are more obvious than others. Unlike in the The Thirteen Problems, there is no particular thread to collection - and no story line within the collection to reveal more about Miss Marple (or why the collection is titled Final Cases). For that, 3 stars, not more.

I guess, if Christie had been able alive to have an input in the editing and collating of the stories it might have turned out better, but this was published to provide a final fix for Marple enthusiasts.

So, if you are considering picking up a Marple story for the first time, don't start with this one.