The Murder At The Vicarage By Agatha Christie

ISBN: 978-0007208425

Published By Harper Collins

This is the first of the Miss Marple novels and is set in her home village of St Mary Mead. Colonel Protheroe is an arrogant and generally unpleasant man, but the residents of the village are shocked when he is found shot dead in the vicar's study.

There is a nice array of suspects including the Colonel's wife and daughter, a local artist, and a rather suspicious archaeologist and is secretary. We see everything unfold from the vicar's point of view, and being a man of the cloth, an awful lot of people want to confide in him, giving him access to more information that perhaps he really wants to know. 

Miss Marple is, at first portrayed as a rather gossipy old lady, but the vicar warms to her over the course of the book and at the end she is seen to be a very clever woman and an excellent judge of character.

This is classic Christie territory, she captures life in an English village, with all its secrets and gossip, perfectly. The plot in The Murder at the Vicarage uses a couple of classic Christie’s red herrings which she will use repeatedly through her writing in one form or another. We fall for them every time though!