The Thirteen Problems

by Agatha Christie

Book 2 in the Miss Marple Mysteries series.

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At gatherings in St Mary Mead, members of the Tuesday Night Club take turns describing mysteries they believe the others cannot solve. The cases involve poisoning, disappearance, disguised identity, supernatural appearances and crimes committed in households whose surviving witnesses misunderstood what they saw.

Miss Marple repeatedly reaches the solution by comparing each story with patterns of behaviour observed in village life. The collection establishes her method before the later novels and captures the conversational culture of interwar drawing rooms, where travel, professional experience and social confidence are quietly defeated by an elderly woman’s exact memory of human motives.