Lucy Foley Takes Miss Marple to the Alps in New Continuation Novel

Lucy Foley has written the first Miss Marple continuation novel, Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel (HarperCollins, £22), and the reviewer's verdict is largely favourable: Foley "provides a solution worthy of the Queen of Crime herself."

The undertaking, the review notes, "must have been a more difficult undertaking than a new Hercule Poirot." The reason: Christie furnished the Belgian detective with "a cartoonist's worth of exaggerated traits," making him "surely easier to bring off the page than the unassuming but observant elderly spinster."

Foley makes what the review calls "a commendable attempt," relocating Miss Marple from the postwar austerity of St Mary Mead to "the comparative luxury of the Swiss Alps." The structure has its costs. Although the unnamed body appears in the gondola cabin at the start, an immediate backward shift for a two-day lead-up means "Miss Marple has little actual detecting to do until about halfway through the proceedings."

The use of four narrators "rather dilutes things," the review argues, and necessitates "a considerable amount of Murder of Roger Ackroyd-style withholding of information." But when the hotel is cut off from the outside world, Foley's Miss Marple "shows her true colours" and delivers the goods.

Hallett's Fairway Players return

Janice Hallett's The Silent Appeal (Viper, £20) reunites readers with the amateur dramatic group the Fairway Players, first encountered in her debut novel, The Appeal. The group's new production is The Hollow, the play Agatha Christie dramatised from her own novel of the same name.

As before, lawyers Charlotte and Femi must review "the mountain of emails, online messages and police reports through which the story is told" in order to establish what happened. The premise is stark: all readers know at the start is that "a brutal murder was committed."

Hallett "slowly but expertly ratchets up the tension," the review finds, as "clashes over casting, power plays, marital suspicions and distrust of newcomers create an entire gallery of potential murderers and murderees."

The epistolary method "may not be for everyone," the reviewer concedes, "but Hallett excels at the form." The missives are "variously funny, sinister, heartfelt and thoroughly human in their relatable pettiness," and the plot is "well up to her usual standard."

The roundup signals that Agatha Christie remains a gravitational force for today's crime writers — one inheriting her detective outright, the other staging her play inside a whodunit of her own.