They Do It With Mirrors

On my quest to read through all of Christie's mysteries chronologically, this one was a bit disappointing. If you want to give Agatha Christie a try but haven't read many of her books, go ahead and skip over this one.

For those interested in WHY, here are a few points:

1. I liked that, as a Miss Marple mystery, Miss Marple was present from the beginning. However, she lacks her usual acumen for deduction in this one. You can't follow her logical train of thought and wonder if there is one.

2. The reason for this, and why Christie gives very few clues, is that the solution is very easy to figure out. The only thing missing is motive, which you don't find out until the end, probably because she was afraid of the readers guessing it. But with the title of the book and the map... I guessed it immediately.

3. The character development is really lacking in this one. Every one of them seems to be a stereotype to take at face value. Gina is an untamable, flirtatious Italian young woman. Carrie Louise is an ethereal old woman who cannot face the realities of this world (not sure what that even means). Wally is the American boy with American values. Etc. What's worse, instead of demonstrating to us these qualities in the characters, she outright tells them to us over and over again. Not to mention, you know little to nothing about the man who gets murdered or why.

4. Since the book takes place entirely within the grounds of a rehab facility for juvenile boys, you get a lot of remarks about...what to do about them. Christie doesn't take a hard stance but she does take a soft one. There is a lot of sentiment about how “we should be helping the good boys and not the bad ones” and “bad boys will always be bad” and “crazy people should be locked away.” Plus, there seems to be a lot of skepticism about psychology and psychiatry. This makes sense just a few years after WWII, when ideas about mental health were changing. But I am not sure how I felt about how it was expressed in this book.