Review of Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel (New Miss Marple #1) by Agatha Christie and Lucy Foley

I loved Foley's 1950s-set snowy mountaintop murder mystery, informed by Agatha Christie's style and iconic Miss Marple character, but incorporating Foley's signature multiple point-of-view perspectives and addressing issues that feel relevant today.

The fictional Grand Alpine Hotel is located high in the Swiss Alps and can only be accessed by a winding railway. It feels to some like the perfect getaway in 1950, five years following the end of World War II.

So when two nuns, a starlet, a politician and his dutiful wife, a hotheaded friend, a couple of underestimated elderly women, a detail-focused companion, an inspector, and a hotel full of other guests and staff find that a murder has occurred in their midst, everything is thrown into turmoil--and no one can escape it.

Everyone is keeping secrets, and the reader will likely suspect multiple characters who are hiding crucial facts and playing everything close to the vest.

This classic-feeling mystery is very much set in another age, yet it brings to light issues relevant today centering around, for example, male-female power imbalances, societal limitations, unorthodox paths to happiness, and desperate, elaborate measures taken to try to ensure freedom.

The denouement reveals deliciously ambitious, wonderfully over-the-top details that helped the various aspects of the mountaintop crimes go off largely without a hitch--but Miss Marple's eagle eyes don't miss much, and she ultimately identifies the real story behind various protagonists' lies.

In Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, Lucy Foley writes within a classic Agatha Christie-style setup, while incorporating Foley's own signature multiple point of view perspective to explore each character in turn. Foley aimed to channel the legendary author while inserting elements that are relevant and powerful to modern-day readers. In Foley's author's note she addresses how she came to write this first Miss Marple mystery in 50 years, in cooperation with Agatha Christie's estate.

I listened to this novel as an audiobook, narrated by Hayley Atwell, Lucy Boynton, Adeel Akhtar, Mara Wilson, and Hugh Kermode.

Lucy Foley is coming to speak to my local library foundation this fall, and I can't wait!

More Bossy Titles to Check Out

Foley is also the author of The Book of Lost and Found, The Invitation, Last Letter from Istanbul, The Hunting Party, The Guest List, The Paris Apartment, and The Midnight Feast.

You might also be interested in other Bossy mystery reviews, or other mysteries featuring sleuths of a certain age.