Rating: 
Summary: Great as a mystery, but I think there's a little hiccup
Review: When Jerry Burton was ordered to find a restful place to recover from injuries from flying, Lymstock seemed to be just what the doctor ordered - a little village which had been left behind in time in everything except gossipping. He and his modern sister Joanna took a lease on a house, Little Furze, whose owner had been forced to let out due to financial needs.At first, the village appeared perfect. It was certainly small enough that the Burtons got to know a number of notable locals who were to play prominent roles in the nasty affair to follow. There was the village pastor who appeared to be more a scholar than a shepherd, and his wife who made people she could see right into their souls. There was Owen Griffith, the local doctor, and his sister Aimee, the alpha female with boundless energy. There was Richard Symington, the lawyer, who had two sons and an enigmatic step-daughter from his wife's previous marriage. There was also Elise Holland, whose appearance sent Jerry Burton to the skies and whose voice brought him crashing down to earth. Perhaps it was traditional provincial animosity towards outsiders, Joanna received a poison pen letter soon after their arrival. But later they realised they were not the only ones. Various other ladies also received one. Strangely, though there were authentic materials available, the writer of the letters chose to fabricate the accusations. The recepients tried to ignore or deny the letters until one day, Mrs Symington, wife of the local lawyer, apparently poisoned herself with one such letter found nearby. Shortly after that, her maid was found murdered. As the progress of the police appeared slow, the pastor's wife called in Ms Jane Marple. Using the subconscious observations of an outsider, Jerry Burton, she pieced the truth and ferreted the real culprit out. The writing of this novel is excellent. Again, Agatha Christie managed to vividly desribed the personalities and interpersonal interactions of various characters to subtly build a background to a murder, without the whole picture being obvious. She also gave a lively description of a bucolic small village scene, making it interesting even to those who had no real interest in being personally involved such rustic settings. The only flaw I could detect was in the evidence, the typewriter identified used in the crime. Due to certain timings of the recepients getting the letters, the poison pen writer should not have been able to use the typewriter in the described manner to send one of the letters.
Rating:
Summary: Miss Marple cannot save the story
Review: Written during the long wartime nights in London, only stopped by the frequent bombing raids, The Moving Finger (1943) is Agatha Christie's 42nd novel. ..."Rather to my surprise... I find that another one [of my books] I am rather pleased with is The Moving Finger," Christie wrote in her autobiography. True, you cannot miss the typical Miss Marple setting: take a small village engaged in gossip and add a nice juicy murder that could have been committed by every person living in that village. But that is where the parallel with books like The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) stops. The characters depicted in The Moving Finger are crudely sketched, becoming almost unbelievable. For example, the main character, narrator and lacking all credibility, starts to annoy you after the first ten pages with his single-minded comments and simply ruins the pace of the story. When Miss Marple appears on the last pages, she cannot rescue the story, because the solution she proposes seems to have but few connections the actual story.
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