The Moving Finger (Miss Marple #4)

 

The Moving Finger
Miss Marple #4

Agatha Christie
Original Publication date: July 1, 1942 
Released as an audiobook: July 3, 2012 by Harper Audio
Genre: Mystery

Rating: 2 🍷🍷

Summary: 

(synopsis from Amazon) 

Lymstock is a town with more than its share of shameful secrets - a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate mail causes only a minor stir. But all that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs. Symmington, commits suicide. Her final note says "I can’t go on", but Miss Marple questions the coroner's verdict of suicide. Soon nobody is sure of anyone - as secrets stop being shameful and start becoming deadly.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

The placid village of Lymstock seems the perfect place for Jerry Burton to recuperate from his accident under the care of his sister, Joanna. But soon a series of vicious poison-pen letters destroys the village's quiet charm, eventually causing one recipient to commit suicide. The vicar, the doctor, the servants—all are on the verge of accusing one another when help arrives from an unexpected quarter. The vicar's houseguest happens to be none other than Jane Marple.

My thoughts: The narrator on this audiobook killed the story for me. He had the thickest British accent one can imagine and that made it almost impossible to understand half of the passages. Like with the other Christie books I've read this year, this was just a slow moving mystery that had a lot of characters and not enough action. Why exactly if the town is so close knit do the townspeople seem to embrace the opinion and sleuthing abilities of the outsider Jerry? How in the world does Christie get away with portraying the girl Megan as a flyaway nonsensical girl one minute to having her be the love interest of Jerry the next? This is supposedly labelled a Miss Marple mystery but yet that character doesn't show up until the last quarter of the book. A very lackluster read on all accounts.