Gwenda Reed has come from New Zealand to find a home for herself and her new husband. She settles on a small South Coast town, Dilmouth, but feels she actually remembers the house. A visit to a London play brings back a terrifying vision of a woman's body lying in the hall, and another member of the theatre party, Miss Jane Marple, comes into the picture.

Each companion on a bus tour of English homes and gardens provides Miss Marple with a valuable clue to a bizarre crime.

Cheap satin and peroxide blondes were a rare sight in St. Mary Mead, at least before film-man Basil Blake bought a cottage and invited down the London crowd. Then a girl in a garish get-up is found strangled in Colonel Bantry's library, and it appears Basil is involved.

When Jane Marple goes to stay with her old, and rather frail, friend Carrie-Louise at her Victorian Gothic mansion, she soon begins to realize that all is not well there.

Elspeth McGillicuddy was not a woman usually given to hallucinations. But when she witnesses what appears to be a woman being strangled on a train and no-one else sees it, no-one reports it and no corpse is found she turns to her old friend Jane Marple to help solve the puzzle. Marple asks her highly efficient and intelligent young acquaintance, Lucy Eyelesbarrow to infiltrate the Crackenthorpe family, who seem to be at the heart of the mystery, and...

Collects eight classic Christie mysteries in a treasury that includes four vignettes starring the inimitable Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot; two featuring the indomitable English gentlewoman Miss Marple; and two supernatural stories.

A notice in the Gazette reads: "A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29, at Little Paddocks." The guests arrive, thinking they have come to a mystery party. When death and chaos ensue, the indomitable Miss Marple sorts it out.

"For the first time in forty-five years, Agatha Christie's legendary sleuth Jane Marple returns to solve twelve baffling cases penned by a host of acclaimed authors skilled in the fine art of mystery and murder. In St. Mary Mead, a Christmas dinner is interrupted by unexpected guests; the Broadway stage in New York City is set for a dangerous improvisation; bad omens surround an untimely death aboard a cruise ship to Hong Kong; and a bestselling writer...