By the Pricking of My Thumbs

by Agatha Christie

Book 4 in the Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries series.

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While visiting an elderly aunt in a nursing home, Tuppence meets a resident who speaks of a child hidden behind a fireplace. After the woman disappears, a painting leads Tuppence to an isolated house and a village where old deaths, missing children and local legends have never been satisfactorily explained.

Tommy and Tuppence are now an older couple whose wartime experience does not protect them from being dismissed or manipulated. The novel uses post-war institutions, changing villages and the persistence of private memory to create a darker mystery about crimes that survive because communities convert disturbing knowledge into harmless folklore.