Ruth Van Rydock can’t shake the feeling that something terrible is going to happen to her sister at Stonygates house.
Her old school friend Jane Marple decides it’s time to pay a visit.
But this grand Victorian mansion isn’t just a family home – it’s also a correctional facility for wayward young men.
And when something terrible does indeed happen, Miss Marple must face her most eccentric cast of suspects yet.

I enjoyed ‘They Do It With Mirrors‘ more for its tone and its characters than for the mystery, although the mystery is a pretty good one.

I was inclined to like this book because it’s a Miss Marple mystery. I find them much easier to slip into than the Poirot mysteries. Jane Marple feels more like a real person to me than Hercule Poirot. Where Poirot is driven by a mixture of ego, curiosity and his sometimes fickle notions of justice, Marple simply sees the worst in people and does what she can either to prevent the bad acts or hold those who commit them accountable. Poirot solves puzzles. Marple sees people. Poirot grandstands. Marple stands in the shadows and watches.

I liked the character of Carrie Louise, a woman who everyone claimed to hold in high affection but who very few people really saw. I loved that the plot hinged on Carrie Louise being regarded as woman too fragile to be confronted with unpleasantness and as so otherworldly that she didn’t understand reality, when the truth is that she sees people as clearly as Jane Marple does but she approaches the world with a little more hope. Still, hope is probably easier to sustain when you are wealthy and your social position is unassailable.

Jane and Carrie Louise are old friends, although old friends who have not met for many years. I liked the way they related to one another. I particularly liked that Jane Marple’s relationship with Carrie Louise led her to understand that sometimes its necessary not only to listen to other people but to imagine that they might be right.

I was intrigued by the glimpses and hints at who Jane Marple was when she was young. She and Carrie Louise and Ruth were all at school together, which, given how wealthy the other two were, was surprising. The three also seem to have been firm friends. Ruth still actively seeks Jane out. All of which made me wonder what happened to Jane Marple in between being a vibrant young girl and becoming a white-haired spinster lady with a talent for making herself invisible? Whatever it was, Jane never speaks of it nor does she seem to mourns it, at least not in the books that I’ve read so far.

It was nice to see Agatha Christie allowing the police in this book to be competent. They didn’t need to be rescued by The Great Detective. They acknowledged that Miss Marple wasn’t the innocent old lady she is often assumed to be and engaged with her in a way that didn’t undermine their authority and which allowed her to work unnoticed.

The mystery was fun, mostly because Agatha Christies was playing games with her readers. She told me very early on, that this book was explicitly about misdirection and yet she still managed successfully to misdirect me several times starting by playfully setting me up to expect a locked-room murder and then delivering something quite different.

I recommend the Emilia Fox audiobook version of ‘They Do It With Mirrors‘. Emilia Fox does a great job. The sample I heard of the Joan Hickson narration sounded flat by comparison.