[The Moving Finger] [by: Agatha Christie]

Jerry Burton has come to the village of Lymstock to recover from an accident, and the quiet place he chose for convalescence turns out to be anything but. Someone is sending poison-pen letters to everyone in the village, malicious anonymous notes that expose real or invented shameful secrets, and when one recipient is driven to apparent suicide, the investigation cannot be avoided. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple third novel uses the poison-pen letter, a crime form she understood particularly well, as the engine of a cleverly plotted mystery.

Richard E. Grant brings theatrical intelligence to the narration, giving the English village setting its proper register of buried hostility beneath rural politeness. His Miss Marple, arriving partway through the novel, is precisely calibrated: unassuming in manner, sharp as glass in observation. At just under six and a half hours, this is one of the more tightly constructed Marple entries, with Christie's solution arriving as a genuine surprise.