Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie

[troisoiseaux]

Read Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie and - ironically, for a book about deja vu - could not figure out whether or not I'd read this one before. (Confusing things further was that it turns out to be one of the at least three Christie novels to feature an apparently senile elderly woman in a nursing home who talks about a child buried behind a fireplace! Fascinating implications for my Agatha Christie Extended Universe theory, because either Marple, Poirot, and Tommy and Tuppence do in fact all exist in the same universe and have encountered the same woman, or they don't, but this specific scenario is a constant across multiple universes; equally fascinating on a Doylist level, because— what???) ANYWAY. This was a fun one: the spoiler-free version is that a young couple reconstructs a twenty-year-old murder that hits close to home, literally. Actually, although the "young couple plays detective" narrative structure makes for a fun vibe to read, the mystery itself is quite strikingly sad— the victim was killed by her controlling half-brother, who she'd entered a marriage of convenience to escape; the entire mystery hinges on main character Gwenda's suddenly-triggered memory of having witnessed her stepmother's murder when she was a small child; and it turns out that the murderer had a. gaslit Gwenda's father into believing he had murdered his own wife, driving him to suicide, and also b. straight-up murdered two other people to cover up his crime!!