“Възмездието” / “Nemesis”
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Autor:
Agatha Christie
Country:
Bulgaria (BG)
Book Theme:
European writers “without borders”
Publisher:
Collins Crime Club
Publishing Year:
1971
Agatha was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, especially with fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world’s longest-running play The Mousetrap. A writer during the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction”, Christie has been called the “Queen of Crime”. She was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies. She was an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. According to UNESCO, she remains the most-translated individual author.
National Award for Children’s and Young People’s
Abstract
Miss Jane Marple receives out of the blue a letter from the estate of millionaire financier Jason Rafiel, a man she knew briefly while on vacation in the island of St Honoré—that being the plot of A Caribbean Mystery. Mr. Rafiel has died, and he has left Miss Marple a bequest of £20,000, but on a strange condition. Mr. Rafiel, who knew Miss Marple for only a short while but saw first-hand her fearlessness, her detective skills, and her dedication to justice, has instructed his lawyers that Miss Marple will receive the money only if she solves a certain crime. The only problem is, the will says absolutely nothing about what that crime is.
Intrigued, Miss Marple accepts the request. No explanatory details are forthcoming, but she does soon get a message that Mr. Rafiel paid for her to join a bus tour of notable English houses and gardens. Assuming that her ticket was purchased for a reason, Miss Marple goes on a tour. Also on the tour is one Elizabeth Temple, a retired school administrator who reveals an important piece of the puzzle. Some years ago one of her students, Verity Hunt, was once engaged to be married to Jason Rafiel’s son Michael, but that the marriage did not happen.
The tour stops in a sleepy English village, where Miss Marple gets another surprise. She is approached by a Mrs. Lavinia Glynne, who reveals that Mr. Rafiel, a friend of the family, requested that Mrs. Glynne and her two sisters host Miss Marple during what is reportedly a physically taxing part of the tour that requires a lot of hiking not suitable for an old lady. It is at the home of Mrs. Glynne and her unmarried sisters Clotilde Bradbury-Scott and Anthea Bradbury-Scott that Miss Marple learns the rest of the puzzle. The Hunt-Rafiel marriage didn’t happen because Verity Hunt was murdered. Michael Rafiel is now in jail serving a life sentence for that murder. Miss Marple, assuming that this is the mystery she’s been hired to solve, sets out to discover who really killed Verity Hunt.
