Book review: The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

Yet another Ag Christ; as wiki puts it The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, a novel by Agatha Christie, was published in the UK in 1962... features amateur detective Miss Marple solving a mystery in St Mary Mead.

This makes it a fairly late book and the modern world begins to intrude: SMM has a Developement of modern housing, conveniently providing a source of new characters, though Ag herself feels firmly trapped in the past and the characters are perhaps less modern than olde tyme parlormaids transported into the then-present day.

Aanyway, I pat myself on the back for guessing the central plot line and therefore central plot twist: German-measels-causes-fetal-abnormalities, therefore our Actress is horrified in realising who ruined her life, therefore the poison really was intended for the Humble Victim, and the swap was deliberate not accidental.

I failed to work out how the HV spilt her drink, having been mislead, as intended, by the "her". In arrears I admired the subtle way the fact that they were close together at the time was introduced.

Weaker elements: that the Actress's first husband was the husband of the HV is both totally unbelievable and quite pointless; I really don't know what Our Ag was thinking of. Similarly the death of Ella and Giuseppe is nearly-totally-pointless and I think in a more elegant version would have been avoided. Indeed we don't formally discover who did kill them - or even if it was the same person - though I think in context we are lead to think that the husband did.

The central plot item, though not implausible, is definitely contrived; the sort of thing that you read about perhaps and think "oh that would fit well into a book" and it fits, but not I think quite well.