At Bertram's Hotel

At Bertram's Hotel takes Miss Marple away from St. Mary Mead for a London holiday, where the hotel's impeccably maintained Edwardian atmosphere strikes her as too perfect, too precisely what it appears to be. The novel is one of Christie's most self-aware, using the hotel as a metaphor for surfaces that conceal, and Miss Marple as the observer uniquely equipped to notice when what is in front of her does not quite add up.

Stephanie Cole brings a particular intelligence to Miss Marple, finding the character's sharp attentiveness beneath the pleasant exterior without telegraphing it. Cole's performance suggests a woman whose apparent benignity is a kind of camouflage, which is precisely what Christie intended, and the hotel's period setting comes through with the right quality of preserved-in-amber detail.