Miss Pinkerton believes there is a murderer at work in her quiet village and predicts that the local doctor will be next - Luke Fitzwilliam is inclined to dismiss her as an over-imaginative spinster, until she is killed in a hit-and-run and he learns that her prediction was correct…

This one had a pretty clever solution, though I did pick up on a major clue very early on and figured it out towards the end. I don’t think this reflects any particular detective skills on my part, but since I’ve read quite a few Christies by this point, I think I’m perhaps a little more attuned to some of the ways Christie makes clever use of language to hide clues in plain sight than I would have been before (though let’s be honest, I still rarely solve her mysteries!).

I found our young amateur detectives a little annoying (and frankly idiotic once or twice), so I wasn’t really blown away by how the story unfolded. I also didn’t really need the romance sub-plot - it added nothing to the central murder mystery, and certainly as a modern reader it felt rather random and progressed absurdly quickly.

A solid sleepy-village multiple murder mystery with amateur detectives and a pretty clever solution.