Mr. Rafiel from A Caribbean Mystery is back, this time with a posthumous mission for Miss Marple: “investigate a certain crime” and after a year, she will be entitled to GBP 20,000 from his estate. “Our code word, my dear lady, is Nemesis,” he writes in his letter. It’s a reference to something she tells him in A Caribbean Mystery and Miss Marple understands it to mean that he’d like her to correct a miscarriage of justice.

Nemesis is only the second-to-the-last Miss Marple novel, but to me, it feels more like her grand finale than Sleeping Murder does. Partly because Miss Marple feels older here. Nemesis has a larger cast of characters than Sleeping Murder, and also involves a physically strenuous walking tour, so there are more people here commenting on Miss Marple’s age and frailty. She plays along with it, as she does to help gather clues, but I also can’t help feeling that she is a bit more physically frail here than usual.

But more importantly, the mystery in Nemesis also feels more grandiose and more of a magnum opus, so to speak, than the one in Sleeping Murder. There are more references to other aspects of Miss Marple’s life: Mr. Rafiel, of course, but also references to her nephew Raymond and her old friend Sir Henry Clithering. And the mystery itself is also such a Mystery. Not just whodunnit and why, but also, what evern was done in the first place?

The journey to get to these answers is wonderfully twisty and complex. And the more I read, the more I realized that the reveal is likely to be really sad, with the kind of insights into human relationships that Agatha Christie is so good at.

First, the cast of suspects is huge. Mr. Rafiel sends Miss Marple on a tour that has fifteen other people on it. Presumably, at least one of those people is involved in the crime Mr. Rafiel wants Miss Marple to solve. Also possibly, could this turn into a Murder on the Orient Express situation, and all of them turn out to be involved?

Just as I was turning over that possibility in my mind (and getting cross-eyed staring at the list of suspects), Christie throws in another twist: Mr. Rafiel has also asked some old friends (a trio of sisters) along the tour route to invite Miss Marple to their home. The official reason is that he wants to give Miss Marple a break from one of the more strenuous days on the tour, but of course, we all know that it’s likely one or more of these sisters is actually involved in the crime.

Gradually, we learn that Mr. Rafiel’s son, Michael, was in prison for murdering a young woman. There were other young women who’d also gone missing and were presumed dead around the same time period, so even though Michael was convicted of one murder, it’s possible he was also responsible for others.

Important context is that Michael was known as a bad guy; he’d also previously been accused of raping another woman. I’ll flag here that characters in this novel express some outdated attitudes around sexual assault and false accusations from victims, which is very much a product of Christie’s time and thankfully no longer widely acceptable. But the basic thrust is that, however spotty Michael’s sexual history is, is he actually guilty of murder? And if he didn’t kill the young woman, who did and why?

And then, while Miss Marple is with the sisters, a member of the tour group is struck by a boulder and sent to hospital in critical condition. Who’s responsible, and is it in any way connected to the young woman’s murder?

Did I Solve the Mystery?

Yes! Or at least I mostly did. I thought a second character was involved in the crimes, who turned out to be innocent. But I guessed the killer for the most important crime, and I also picked up on pretty much all the important clues! So I’m going to clock this as practically a win, and laugh at the fact that I actually tried to complicate matters more than Christie herself intended.

***SPOILERS BELOW***

My Verdict

I think Clotilde Bradbury-Scott killed Verity Hunt. She tried to frame her sister Anthea to Miss Marple by saying Anthea was the jealous type and also psychologically unwell, but I think it’s more likely Clotilde. She’d raised Verity like a daughter, and was either sad that Verity had decided to secretly marry Michael Rafiel, or worried for Verity’s welfare. I’m guessing she tried to stop Verity from going to the church, they got into a fight, and she accidentally killed Verity. Verity’s body is buried in the sisters’ backyard, under “the mound with the white flowers” that Miss Marple noticed. Miss Marple had earlier identified the white flowers as Polygonum Baldschuanicum, which is a very quick-growing plant that “covered everything, and covered it in a remarkably short time.” It also kept anything else from growing in the area, which made it perfect to cover up a dead body quickly.

I suspect Clotilde over Anthea because both she and Lavinia keep talking about how spacey Anthea is, so I feel like Anthea is too obvious a suspect. There’s also something shady with the coffee Clotilde served Miss Marple. Miss Cooke warned Miss Marple against drinking it, and then Clotilde “accidentally” knocked the cup over with her sleeve, which could be to destroy the evidence. Clotilde then gave Miss Marple a glass of warm milk afterwards, which could have been another attempt to poison her, since the coffee didn’t work.

The corpse that folks thought was Verity is actually Nora Broad. I’m guessing Clotilde’s sister Lavinia Glynne killed her to help her sister cover up Verity’s murder and take revenge on Michael by framing him for the crime. The key clue here is that the face was disfigured, which I thought was a red herring, but with the “mound of white flowers” in the sisters’ garden, now I think may mean the obvious.

Miss Cooke was suspicious at first, because she showed up at Miss Marple’s home in St. Mary Mead before the tour, and then pretended to be a gardener even though Miss Marple clocked that she didn’t really know much about gardening. Then she showed up at the tour with a changed appearance and pretended not to know Miss Marple. Instead of being involved in the murder, I think Mr. Rafiel actually sent her to be a bodyguard for Miss Marple, and keep her safe while she’s investigating the crime.

Finally, who killed Elizabeth Temple? Any of the sisters could have done it; Miss Marple was napping when the murder happened, and didn’t see the sisters again till dinnertime. It’s definitely Clotilde or Lavinia, and I’m going to guess Lavinia. I feel like she’s more calculating than Clotilde, and better at executing plans. She learned from Miss Marple that Elizabeth Temple was in town for the tour, and killed her as revenge for not stopping Verity from falling in love with Michael. Or possibly to prevent her from saying anything about how much in love Verity and Michael were. Miss Marple pretended to suspect Joanna and Emlyn to throw the sisters off the scent, and Lavinia had Anthea mail the package with the distinctive black and red checked top to charity, so that it couldn’t be traced to her.

The Actual Reveal

Clotilde did it all. She loved Verity so much she didn’t want to lose her to Michael, so she likely put poison in Verity’s drink like she tried to do to Miss Marple. It wasn’t a crime of passion like I thought, but rather a planned-out act of jealousy. Miss Marple also guessed that Verity’s desire to elope with Michael wasn’t just because she loved him, but also because she wanted to escape Clotilde’s smothering version of love.

Clotilde also killed Nora for the motives I thought: to cover up Verity’s actual cause of death and to frame Michael. And finally, she killed Elizabeth Temple because she was afraid Verity had told her about her plans to elope with Michael.

My big error was not paying close enough attention to timelines. I’d assumed Lavinia made it back in time to kill Nora, or at least that Verity’s disappearance could have been hidden long enough for Lavinia to make it back. I also thought Clotilde would have been too heartbroken over killing Verity to do the cold-blooded planning necessary to kill Nora.

I was also somewhat fooled by Anthea’s comment that “it’s a good thing” Lavinia came back; I thought she meant because Lavinia was then able to cover Clotilde’s crime, but it’s just that Anthea suspected something dark about Clotilde and felt safer with Lavinia around.