A possible murderer loose on the island resort where Miss Jane Marple has gone to stay for a vacation? Then a sudden death and an inn owner who suddenly starts having memory lapses?

Why that sounds like a recipe for a very good mystery and, indeed, it was.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie isn’t short on humor despite the tough subject matter of murder.

Miss Marple provides a good serving of witty comebacks and thoughts and is joined in her sleuthing by an elderly gentleman who is mostly paralyzed from the waist down.

Here is a description from Goodreads for you:
Nephew Raymond West has given his favourite aunt, Jane Marple, a vacation at a beautiful resort in the Caribbean. While there she encounters an old wind-bag. One of his stories is about meeting a murderer. He has a snapshot. Suddenly he hesitates, and gets flustered. By the next morning, he is dead, seemingly of natural causes. Miss Marple has doubts.

And well she should.

In some Miss Marple books, a superintendent or detective from Scotland Yard of a small police force is the main investigator and we see a lot of the book from their perspective with Miss Marple popping in once in a while to show them up. In this book, Jane is our main character throughout the entire book and I loved having a better look inside her mind.

Jane runs this investigation on her own by studying the other guests at the resort and it is uncanny how many of them have some sort of connection to each other.

There are two couples who seem to know each other very well and, it later turns out, came to the resort together. There are the owners of the resort, Tim and Molly Kendall, who haven’t owned the inn long. Then there is a vicar and his wife, Mr. Rafiel, the man in the wheelchair, and Mr. Rafiel’s secretary and Mr. Jackson, his masseuse who have come with him.

I really enjoyed this one and started to get attached to Mr. Rafiel. I think he would have been a wonderful sidekick to Jane in other books.

What is so funny about the Miss Marple books is how Agatha head hops between characters. This is said to be a writing no-no these days but I don’t care. Head hopping is where the author tells the reader what each character is thinking in a scene instead of only sticking to our main character’s thoughts. A lot of writers of classic books did this – especially Jane Austen and the Brontes and L.M. Montgomery. If you do it these days, people shame you for it. It’s odd.

But anyhow, what is so funny in the Miss Marple books is that Jane will ask someone something and Agatha tells us that the person who is being questioned is thinking how either they didn’t expect that question to come from an old woman, the woman is batty, or the woman is “sex and scandal obsessed.”

Miss Marple isn’t really interested in scandal, though. She wants to hear about and solve murders.

“But it wasn’t really scandals Miss Marple wanted. Nothing to get your teeth into in scandals nowadays. Just men and women changing partners, and calling attention to it, instead of trying decently to hush it up and be properly ashamed of themselves.”

Back in St. Mary Mead, where Jane lives, she usually has someone to bounce  her ideas off of when she is solving a mystery, her nephew who works at Scotland yard being one. This time, though, she is on  her own, until she confides in Mr. Rafiel about her theories. She urges him to help her solve the crime.

He scoffs at that idea. “We, you say? What do you think I can do about it? I can’t even walk without help. How can you and I set about preventing a murder? You’re about a hundred and I’m a broken-up old crock.”

One thing I really like about Agatha Christie books is that she doesn’t just leave you thinking about the mystery but about life itself.

At one point Jane says, “Life is more worth living, more full of interest when you are likely to lose it. It shouldn’t be, perhaps, but it is. When you’re young and strong and healthy, and life stretches ahead of you, living isn’t really important at all. It’s young people who commit suicide easily, out of despair from love, sometimes from sheer anxiety and worry. But old people know how valuable life is and how interesting.”

If you haven’t read any of the Miss Marple books, this would be a good one to start with. As I mentioned above, it lets you inside the mind of Miss Marple more than the books where a police detective is leading the case.