Chapter One

Present

I’ve been told my entire life that the perfect cup of bush tea is magic, and this morning I hope with every fiber of my being that this is true. There are some hard truths I have to spill, and I’ll take every ounce of help I can get. I’m settled in one of the scarlet chairs in the EAT TV conference room, directly across the table from Travis Spriggs and his nauseating brand of bright, crisp-cut perfection—just right for television, but less like sunshine and more like a fluorescent spotlight at four in the morning. He’s flanked by two people whose names I’ve only seen in producer credits at the end of some of the highest performing shows on network television: my boss’s bosses, both sporting dark suits and expressions like cliff faces. Bronwyn, the studio exec who oversees me, Travis, and the other on-air talent at EAT TV, sits in the plush chair at the head of the table, her usual pleasant expression as drained as the tumbler of coffee in her hand.

They’re all here for me.

“I’ll get things started, Miss Sinclair,” Bronwyn says, looking at me but speaking to the executives. She hasn’t called me Miss Sinclair since the interview when she hired me three years ago. “Mr. Revilla and Ms. Abbott called this meeting. I’m sure you know why. They’re very ready to start work on the show—”

“My show,” Travis murmurs with a smug smile.

“That hasn’t been officially decided,” Bronwyn says. “We can’t have a conversation about our next steps because—well— because we don’t have your ending yet, Naomi.”

“You’ve given us a lot, Miss Sinclair. Lord knows—” Mr. Revilla gestures with a meaty hand at the chunky beige file folder in front of him. “You’ve given us a hell of a lot here.”

“But you haven’t closed the case,” Ms. Abbott speaks up. Woman’s got a twist-out with impressive volume, and I’m glad I’m not the only hair naturalista in the room. Her coils jiggle as she leans toward me. “You still haven’t told us who killed Ursula Merchant.”

I glance at my mug. The Universe seems to be following a recipe for an uncomfortable morning, blending each ingredient together artfully like the chefs I interview on A Word from the Kitchen. But if there’s a recipe for a poisonous morning afoot, I’ve got the antidote here in the cup in front of me. Bush tea—balsam, mint, and lemongrass—picked from the window herb garden in my townhouse kitchen, and brewed fresh daily the way my parents and Virgin Islanders before me have done for generations. Even with the early morning, smarmy coworker and hard truths, one sip can take my mind away from the over

cast Charlotte cityscape beyond the conference room window straight to the sunny green hills of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. I’ve lived in North Carolina for eight years now, but St. Thomas will always be home—and anything that gets me there this fast is magic indeed.

But not right now. I need to stay here, in everything this moment means. Immersed in all that’s led to it. Focused on the possibilities it will usher through. A sip will have to wait.

“That’s what you’ll get from Naomi, Ms. Abbott,” Travis says, injecting his tones with the most bored affect he can muster up. “She’s supposed to be giving you the details for one story, but instead you’ve got—what, five of them in here?” “Six,” Mr. Revilla mutters.

Travis’s brown eyes go wide. “Well, damn, sir, she’ll go off on a tangent or two, but I wouldn’t have guessed as high as six! For a journalist like me, who focuses like hell on the one story he’s got, that’s incomprehensible.”

“We read all six. And we enjoyed them,” Ms. Abbott is quick to assure me.

“But that’s not the point, is it?” Travis asks. “We were each asked to investigate one unsolved food-based mystery for this show you conceived. I gave you that. Naomi’s brought more stories than you can count on one hand, but she hasn’t given you what you asked for. She hasn’t answered the big question.” There’s enough sauce in the smile he beams at me to cover ten full racks of ribs. “You even know who killed her, Nay?”

Bronwyn looks caught between checking Travis’s tone and waiting out my answer. Her bosses follow suit. I sip my tea, still piping hot, and decide to address both. “Of course I know who killed Ursula Merchant,” I answer. “It’s right there in that folder I gave Mr. Revilla. That’s what these are—my notes on the investigation.”

Mr. Revilla and Ms. Abbott exchange a look. She’s ultimately the one who responds. “There’s . . . certainly a story here. Several. You’ve solved quite a few problems on St. Thomas over the past year. But when it comes to the story of Ursula Merchant, the one you were supposed to be investigating the whole time . . . there doesn’t seem to be much of anything.” “Nothing at all,” Mr. Revilla echoes.

“Naomi, they’d really like to make a decision,” Bronwyn says. “Travis presented a fine investigation on the Barbecue Sauce Killings—”

“The Carolina Barbecue Murders,” Travis speaks up. Bronwyn waves him away.

“He’s given us history, interviews, and a compelling hypothesis . . . along with a deep sense of the process, flavor, and sizzle of both styles of Carolina barbecue,” Bronwyn says. “The case you’ve been investigating, this—tea maven in St. Thomas being shot to death in her locked office—it’s equally intriguing. But while you’ve given us so much, you still haven’t given us an ending.”

“You’re right. I haven’t,” I say. “That was intentional. I’m hoping to do that today. Right now, as a matter of fact.” I clasp both hands around my mug.

Travis leans back in his seat, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “You sure that’s what you want? Naomi’s going to take you on a circular journey, which is the way she operates on A Word from the Kitchen. A ton of loose threads—”

“—which she always weaves together. The connections are there,” Bronwyn interrupts. “The best thing we can do right now is just hear you out, Naomi. You say you know how the story ends and what happened to Ursula Merchant. So let’s hear it. Who killed her, and how did all of this lead you there?”

I’m not at the head of the table, but all eyes are on me— Bronwyn’s perfectly lined and shadowed gray eyes are full of hope and curiosity, Mr. Revilla’s and Ms. Abbott’s are expectant behind their eyeglasses, and Travis seems to be trying to will his into lasers capable of slicing me to shreds. I take a deep breath, letting the scent of the brew in my cup ground and fortify me. I’d had a hot cup of bush tea that morning, too. The morning that started it all. The magic in my mug was what set this whole thing into motion—as bush tea always manages to do.

***

Excerpt from The Bush Tea Murder by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier. Copyright 2026 by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier. Reproduced with permission from Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier. All rights reserved.

From beginning of Chapter One...

Paradise isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

Sure, Valerie Corbin knew she and her wife Kristen were supremely fortunate to now reside in the quaint, still-stuck-in-the-1970s town of Hilo on the magnificent Big Island of Hawai‘i—home to lush jungles, fiery volcanoes, black sand beaches, and coral reefs teeming with eye-popping tropical fish.

But at this moment, all she could focus on was the bull terrier-spaniel mix next door barking so loudly that it almost—though not quite—drowned out the whine of the pneumatic tools its owner was using on a jacked-up truck, the parts of which were currently scattered all across his driveway.

Letting loose a few choice words regarding both dog and man, Valerie slammed shut the window above the kitchen sink, then returned to the stove to poke at her potatoes simmering in a pot of water. At the sound of the back door opening, she looked up to see Kristen and her nephew, Sean, come inside from the lānai, Valerie and Kristen’s little white dog, Pua, trotting after them.

“We couldn’t take the racket anymore,” said Kristen, tossing her Outside magazine onto the counter. “Does he ever stop?”

“Who—Akoni or Larry?”

Kristen laughed. “Both, I guess. And yeah, I know the answer: rarely. Especially Akoni, with his constant yowling. Though I gotta say, it seems like Larry’s been working on his vehicles a hell of a lot more of late. And I don’t believe I’ve ever even seen that particular truck before. You think he’s started repairing other people’s vehicles, too?”

“Oh, God, I hope not. Though that would explain the increased frequency of the noise.” Valerie switched off the heat under her potatoes, then turned to Kristen. “I wonder if it’s legal to have a car repair business in this neighborhood. Maybe I should ask at tonight’s meeting if anyone knows.”

“Or maybe you could just talk to your neighbor about it,” put in Sean, who’d taken a seat at the kitchen table and was busy typing something into his phone.

Valerie and Kristen exchanged glances, after which Valerie replied, “Maybe later. But first we should figure out where we stand on the issue.”

Sean set down his phone with a shrug. “So what’s this thing you’re going to tonight, anyway?”

“It’s the monthly meeting for the neighborhood orchid society,” said Valerie, carrying the pot to the sink and dumping the steaming potatoes into a colander. “Shirley invited me—you know, the woman who lives at that house down the street with all those beautiful orchids in her tree ferns? I was admiring them the other day, and after we got talking, she invited me to come along tonight to see if I might be interested in joining. You wanna join me?”

Sean let loose his man bun, held in place by a wooden hair stick, and shook out his dirty-blond locks. “No can do; I’m working tonight at the hospital. It’s my first time in the ER, which should be interesting.”

Sean had come from Arkansas to do a three-month stint as a visiting nurse at the Hilo hospital and was now on his second week at the job—and at Valerie and Kristen’s house, where he’d be staying for the duration of his time on-island. “I didn’t know you were into orchids,” he said in a lazy drawl, pulling his hair back from his face and retying the bun.

“I wasn’t, not till we first got to Hilo. But they’re so amazing and, I dunno . . . other-worldly.”

Star Trek flowers, I call them,” said Kristen, and Valerie nodded.

“And they’re so easy to grow here, so I’m thinking it might be fun to try it myself. Plus, it’d be a great way to get to know some of the folks in the neighborhood a little better.”

“Like Larry?” asked Sean with a grin.

“Ha. I’m not so sure he’s really the orchid type . . .”

***

Excerpt from MURDER, LOCAL STYLE by Leslie Karst. Copyright 2026 by Leslie Karst. Reproduced with permission from Leslie Karst. All rights reserved.

Introduction

I’ve always been a fan of Agatha Christie, but not an obsessive one. I didn’t read and reread the novels. I didn’t go looking for obscure short stories. I didn’t read (and still haven’t) her Mary Westmacott novels. I treated her like most people did: She wrote good mysteries, and if they were handy, I read them.

Then Bill began the Complete, Annotated project by publishing Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body?, followed by Agatha’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Over the years, as he annotated the next five of Agatha’s early novels, I read them carefully for possible footnotes. As I did, I paid more attention to her writing, her deft plotting, her sly sense of humor, and her ability to describe a character with a few sentences.

As I became more familiar with her novels, I realized that she’s underrated, probably because she was categorized as a genre writer. Some even consider her works cozies. Clearly, they never read Appointment with Death (1938), And Then There Were None (1939), or Endless Night (1967). I suspect that her Mary Westmacotts — which are described as romances — are anything but.

The publishing world applies labels to make it easier for bookshops to shelve their books in the store, not because they’re accurate.

In July 2020, as the world began opening up from the Covid-19 shutdowns, I was at the library, looking for a DVD to borrow. I spotted Crooked House (2017). I liked the novel, so I thought, “Why not?”

Crooked House was the second Agatha Christie film adaptation I had seen. Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017) was the first.

We needed fodder for the website (peschelpress.com) and I’d already been reviewing books, so I wrote a review of Crooked House. This reminded me that Bill was working on an annotated edition of The Secret of Chimneys. Was there a movie version? A review for the book would be nice. There was. It was an episode in a box set from ITV’s Marple.

Oookaaaay.

Having become overly familiar with Chimneys, I knew Agatha wrote it years before Miss Marple was a twinkle in her eye. But we watched it anyway. It was terrible. Bill wrote his review for The Complete, Annotated Secret of Chimneys, and I wrote mine for the website.

Since the library’s Marple DVD set included three more episodes, we watched them and I reviewed them for the website.

That’s when Bill said the fateful words that brought us here: “Let’s watch more Agatha films. You write the reviews. I’ll post them on the website, and we’ll publish them as a book.”

So here we are nearly three years later. We had no idea how big the Agatha project would become or how many films have been made for cinema and TV. Bill and I have watched more than 200 adaptations. This includes all the English-language ones we could find beginning with Adventures, Inc. (a 1929 silent movie), and many of the foreign versions too. For those, we were limited by availability and whether or not they had English subtitles. It’s criminal neglect that some of the finest Agatha Christie film adaptations in the world are from Japan, yet they’re unavailable in the West.

To my knowledge, we are the only people who’ve watched all the films. I’m definitely the only person who’s written and posted reviews for all those forgotten TV shows and kinescopes.

Along the way, I became much, much more familiar with Agatha’s writing as I had to read the novels and short stories to compare them to the films. She was cutting edge from the beginning. She invented what we call The Poirot, the practice of bringing together the suspects, explaining the clues, and fingering the criminal. It was a trope born of necessity, when her first attempt — Poirot testifying at the trial — didn’t fly with her publisher.

She began experimenting with narrative structure in 1924 with The Man in the Brown Suit. That novel has two narrators, one of them unreliable. Brown Suit is also a romantic thriller disguised as a mystery. Read the passage where Anne Beddingfeld administers to a mysterious, half-naked, sexy stranger’s wounds. This scene could be ripped from any romance novel of today (the sweet kind, not the spicy which would include far more detail). As a side note, the 1989 TV movie is very true to the text despite being turned into a contemporary.

Agatha was an innovative writer throughout her career. Her The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) is a mash-up of P. G. Wodehouse and John Buchan thrillers. Partners in Crime (1929) is a loose cycle of 16 short stories starring Tommy and Tuppence. Each short story is also a parody of a famous mystery writer, including herself! And unlike Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence aged in real time, from the young, eager lovers in The Secret Adversary (1922) to retired grandparents in Postern of Fate (1973).

And what’s And Then There Were None (1939), in which 10 characters are dispatched in an entertaining manner for their sins, but a PG-rated slasher flick? As a sign of its influence, the basic plot has been lifted, the serial numbers filed off, and rewritten in dozens more novels and movies. The A.B.C. Murders (1936) is a prototypical serial killer novel.

Agatha’s innovations could fill a book and go a long way to explaining why she’s still read today.

The other reason is more subtle.

Whatever you can say about the quality of the adaptations (like The Secret of Chimneys, bleah), they keep Agatha in the public eye. Never underestimate the importance of TV shows and movies on an author’s reputation. For each person who reads, 100 people go to the movies, and a 1,000 people watch TV. Every time an Agatha Christie film is shown, people who’ve never heard of her learn she exists. Some of them search out her books and discover how good her writing is.

When a writer dies, they can vanish under the constant tsunami of books being written and published daily. Dorothy L. Sayers is a prime example. Sayers wrote at the same time as Agatha. She’s highly regarded and her books are great. But her estate, unlike Agatha’s, shows no interest in licensing her stories and novels for TV or movies. Say the phrase: “Murder at Downton Abbey,” then ask why her literary estate isn’t capitalizing on Lord Peter Wimsey, detective in the peerage and a duke’s brother.

The Agatha Christie estate does not want her writing to suffer that fate, so they license her short stories and novels. Some adaptations are excellent; some are dreadful. For a few, the only commonality between novel and film is the name. Most range in between but all have something to offer, even if it’s only great period clothes, quality acting, or English Country House Porn. Linenfold paneling! Crenelated ceilings! Parquet floors as elaborate as the finest Persian carpet!

Excuse me while I stop and fan myself.

Watching 200+ Agatha adaptations also taught me plenty about filmmaking, pacing, and soundtracks. I can now, sometimes, recognize an actor from another adaptation. I’ve enjoyed seeing how one novel can be interpreted multiple ways, resulting in wildly different films. The Pale Horse (1961) is a good example. The three films (including Miss Marple in one!) are recognizably the same story, yet they’ve nothing to do with each other. The emphasis is different, the characters different, the tone is different.

I’ve watched 13 different Poirots (including an anime version). Seven different Marples (including an anime version). Multiple Tommy and Tuppences. Each actor or actress brings something new to the character.

The foreign films demonstrate how universal she is. She wrote about dysfunctional families, mapped the class divide, noticed the lengths we go to for status and security, and found reasons for murder ranging from money to passion to safety.

Ironically, foreign filmmakers respect Agatha more than she is at home. Appointment with Death (1938) has been filmed three times, but the Japanese version is the only one that captures the novel’s cruelty and horror. The two English language versions fail, one moderately and one spectacularly. Of the four versions of The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962), only the Japanese version gives a voice to Margo Bence, one of Agatha’s most abused secondary characters. The other three versions ignore her because to face Margo Bence’s pain would mean admitting that the film business cares nothing for children unless they can be sold to make money.

We did not watch every single foreign TV episode even when they were readily available. There just wasn’t enough time. The best we could do was see enough to convey the flavor of a given series. If you want to see them, enjoy yourself! They provide very different views of Agatha and can be rewarding.

The novel that’s been adapted the most is And Then There Were None (1939). We saw ten versions, ranging from a blurry kinescope to slick studio productions with an all-star cast, so it merits its own chapter. Some versions hew to the stage play with its radically rewritten ending. Others stick to the novel, nihilism intact. Some combine the stage play and the novel, so Vera Claythorne learns who the puppet master was, begs for her life, and receives rough justice.

One final warning before you go: spoilers abound, so beware! Unlike Agatha, I don’t play fair with my reviews and hide whodunnit. Where I play fair is in telling you what I thought of them. I liked films that critics panned, and I disliked films others loved. I say why. I go down sidetracks. I enjoyed myself and I hope you will too.

So won’t you join me for an Agatha Christie Movie Marathon? You’ve got hundreds of hours of viewing pleasure ahead of you. Just remember to never accept a cup of tea you didn’t make, or take trips to lonely islands (or châteaus, or country houses) with strangers.

How to use this book

The films are organized by the starring detective. Miss Marple comes first, followed by Poirot, and Tommy and Tuppence. Next, a chapter is devoted exclusively to And Then There Were None, followed by the rest of the adaptations, and the final chapter is movies in which Agatha herself is the star.

Each chapter opens with a photo gallery showing the actors and actresses who played her detectives and characters.

There’s also an index, which is more important than it appears.

Seems logical, yes? Except that some adaptations removed Agatha’s chosen detective, turning the novel into a police procedural. When that happens, the movie is not included in the detective’s chapter. It’s included in “The Rest of the Christies”. Many of the foreign adaptations fall into this category.

Other adaptations (cough, ITV’s Marple, cough) insert a detective who didn’t exist in the novel. That’s why many standalone novels appear in the Miss Marple chapter. She’s now the star of The Sittaford Mystery, Murder Is Easy, The Pale Horse, and others. She also appears in a Tommy and Tuppence novel, By the Pricking of My Thumbs. Similarly, Margaret Rutherford snatched two Poirot novels and made them her own, so they appear in the Miss Marple chapter.

The chapters dedicated to And Then There Were None and the movies not part of a detective series are self- evident. “Agatha the Star,” however, deserves an explanation. In addition to her stories, Agatha’s life has become fodder for Hollywood. This includes the dreadful Vanessa Redgrave/Dustin Hoffman biopic Agatha (1979), a documentary that quotes from her and her work, a Doctor Who episode, and three movies that show Agatha’s exciting life investigating mysteries in a parallel universe. It focuses on Agatha, not her writing. Any relationship to Agatha’s real life should be considered coincidental. Even the documentary in this chapter is not entirely reliable.

Within each chapter, the films are organized chronologically. As you move forward in time, you’ll see changes in how a character was depicted and movie-making styles. Adventures, Inc. (1929) sets the stage. It’s the earliest Agatha film and the scriptwriter, Jane Bess, played fast and loose with the text. She led the way for hack screenwriters everywhere to rewrite Agatha’s prose.

Each review gets two pages. We chose a banner image and six photos of important cast members. I rate films by fidelity to text (or life in “Agatha the Star,” and either the play or the novel in And Then There Were None) and by the quality of the movie overall. The two ratings are separate, but they complement each other and give you a clearer understanding of what to expect.

The cast lists place detectives and police at the top. Everyone else follows in rough order of importance. We group families together to make it easier to work out relationships. Our cast lists are not comprehensive but the main characters are there.

Also note that for those foreign films which don’t name their characters from the novel, we provide that information. This was omitted when they rewrote them so much (such as Unknown (1965), the Indian version of And Then There Were None) that it would not be helpful.

At the end of the list come the film locations, or (in a couple episodes) a song list. Internet Movie Database and Agatha Christie Wiki provided most of the locations, but Bill added to that from other sources (see the bibliography). Knowing the film locations means you, dear reader, can visit the same castle as Poirot or Miss Marple.

Subtitles matter to me. We always looked for versions with subtitles as so many actors mumble or the sound quality is bad. If I can’t understand the dialog, I miss important points. Not every DVD was released with subtitles.

Fortunately, some of the older films like the Joan Hickson Miss Marples are being cleaned up for streaming. They get subtitles. But they aren’t being released as new DVDs so, no subtitles. If you can watch a streamed version, no problem. If you must use your TV and DVD player, you’re out of luck.

We had to have subtitles for the foreign films. We couldn’t see some films we wanted to (we especially regret passing up the Japanese Murder on the Orient Express) because they either weren’t available with subtitles or they weren’t available at all.

The index will help you find a specific film. This isn’t just because some novels got Miss Marple inserted, putting them into the Miss Marple chapter. Agatha’s novels were often released under different names. For example, the novel Lord Edgware Dies (1933) was released in the U.S. as Thirteen At Dinner. It’s been filmed three times, twice as Lord Edgware Dies and once as Thirteen At Dinner. But they’re all based on the same novel and the index connects them.

I list all the names, with a note as to which film it applies to. Or, as with Margaret Rutherford, the film’s name doesn’t correspond to any edition of the novel but I tell you what to look for.

The bibliography provides further reading and shows where some of my information came from.

Enjoy the book. We enjoyed watching the movies, podcasting about many of them, and writing the reviews. We want it to be used, encouraging you to watch Agatha Christie on the screen, always different but always her.

How the movies are rated

Each movie is given two ratings. Fidelity of text is exactly what it sounds. How close is the film to the original text? Sometimes, only the names match. Other films are so faithful, they’re lifeless.

Quality of movie is about the movie itself. Did everything together work as a film? Often, a very good movie isn’t faithful to the text at all (see Miss Marple in Ordeal By Innocence (2007)). If something jars about the movie, I’ll indicate it here.

The rating icons demonstrate Agatha’s many, many ways of killing. Blunt objects, poisoned cocktails, garrotes, knives, guns, stranglers, being pushed down a flight of stairs. They usually reflect the first murder in the film.

A few films, such as And Then There Were None, get five different symbols to reflect all the ways those nasty people got iced.

How to find the movies

We watched the vast majority of the films on DVD on our TV set, the one our neighbors were throwing away. You’re correct that we count our pennies.

That’s why we use our public library. If yours is like ours, it contains a surprisingly large collection of Agatha Christie films. All you have to do is get a library card to borrow them.

You may, like us, have access to more than one library. It’s worth learning what’s available in your area. We belong to our local library (the Hershey Public Library) and to our county library (the much larger Dauphin County Public Library). They often carry different titles so I always check both before moving on to the next step.

Your library is bigger than your municipality, your county, or even your state. Ask for the interlibrary loan librarian. For us, it’s Denise Philips. Denise got us all kinds of DVDs from libraries across the country. This service is usually free, as libraries are tax-supported. Ask and you may be very pleased. The interlibrary loan may take a few weeks for the requested movie to arrive, but it nearly always will.

If Denise could not get us a title, Bill would search eBay and Amazon. We bought a universal DVD player so we could play DVDs from Europe.

There were obscure kinescopes that were on YouTube, so we watched them on the computer.

There are streaming services, including Amazon which gave us access to Britbox. Dailymotion let us watch the Japanese films.

We don’t recommend skeevy pirate sites. They’re illegal, don’t pay royalties to the creators, and whatever you get will be loaded with viruses and malware and the film may be incomplete or damaged.

*** A review ***

The Sittaford Mystery (2006)

Epic expansion of Trevelyan’s life
leaves little room for a coherent
mystery for Miss Marple to sort out

Fidelity to text: 1 pharaoh’s curse

The novel was eviscerated. The murder, séance, escaped prisoner, and a few names remain. Everything else, including the murderer, were altered beyond recognition. Miss Marple resented being shoved in; she stayed defiantly offstage for long stretches.

Quality of movie: 1½ pharaoh’s curses

The scriptwriter shoved ten pounds of plot into a five-pound running length and the result is incoherence with snow.

The Review

Queue up Sir Mix-a-Lot and “Baby Got Back” and recite along with me:

Oh. My. God.
Look at that plot!

You’ll have to sit through this episode twice (at least) to understand what’s going on. This film is 93 minutes long, not long enough for all the disparate plot threads to be woven in a cohesive fashion. The film needed a minimum of another twenty minutes running time to do it justice.

But since ITV didn’t do that, you, dear viewer, will be left asking what just happened? Rewind, dammit! That’s what we did. Repeatedly. Yet there were many moments when I still can’t tell you what was going on.

The trouble starts with forcing Miss Marple into a property that was never written for her. This can work: see ITV’s By the Pricking of My Thumbs, a Tommy and Tuppence novel.

Not here. In fact, Miss Marple disappeared for long stretches of the film, doing heaven only knows what in Sittaford House while sitting out the blizzard. Maybe she was questioning the staff (we only see one servant in the mansion but there must be more), knitting, and speed-reading Captain Trevelyan’s memoirs. She certainly wasn’t at the Three Crowns Inn, inspecting the body and questioning the guests, even though most of the action takes place there.

An entirely new plot is shoehorned in, vastly expanding Captain Trevelyan’s character and backstory. Suddenly, he’s a war hero (WWI), a suspected war profiteer (WWII), an Olympic skater in between (I think; the dialog was incomprehensible at many key points), a major candidate to be the next prime minister (Winston Churchill (!) has a scene with Captain Trevelyan), and he’s a noted archeologist having discovered a major tomb in Egypt back in 1927 that made his fortune! Compared with Capt. Trevelyan, Indiana Jones was a lazy amateur.

But all this rewriting was necessary to give Timothy Dalton scenery to chew to earn his paycheck. In the novel, Captain Trevelyan exists to be swiftly murdered. He doesn’t even get one line. In the movie — since he’s Timothy Dalton — when he’s not emoting in front of us, he’s the topic of conversation by the other characters.

Which I can understand. It’s Timothy Dalton, and my goodness does he look yummy. Some men age very well and he belongs to that lucky cohort. He’s also got to be expensive so the producers made sure to get their money’s worth. Pity they didn’t spend some of their money on a better script or more film stock.

But he didn’t age that well. I had a hard time believing that virginal, lovely, dewy, eighteen-year-old Violet Willets (Carey Mulligan) fell madly in love with a man old enough to be her grandfather. I know why he did, and it’s not just because Violet resembles the woman he callously abandoned twenty-five years prior in Egypt. Violet is delicious, naïve, and believes every word he says and what man doesn’t want that? As for Violet, she didn’t come across as a gold-digger, which is the usual reason sweet 18-year-olds marry men old enough to be their grandfather. Or maybe she was one and the tacked-on ending where Violet runs off to Argentina with Emily Trefusis proves it.

Violet certainly wasn’t broken up about her husband being murdered on their wedding night. If anything, she seemed relieved. She got it all. The Trevelyan name, the inheritance, two tickets to Buenos Aires, and she didn’t have to sacrifice her sweet toothsome body to some old man, even if he was Timothy Dalton.

The Egyptian subplot was of major importance yet it didn’t make any sense. There was the paranormal aspect too, with a ghostly maiden showing up in Captain Trevelyan’s visions. Was there a curse on the gold scorpion? Was he going crazy? We’re never told. The ghost follows a different movie’s script when it appears and vanishes.

This script also doesn’t tell us how an Egyptian servant can show up in isolated Sittaford in 1949 and get hired on, no questions asked. I understand that the servant problem was bad enough that the upper crust didn’t ask as many questions as they could. But here? Really?

We know Captain Trevelyan did potentially bad things in Egypt. Yet he wasn’t suspicious when this mysterious Egyptian showed up at his door? He’d been having weird dreams about his past. He’s got a burgeoning political career which means close scrutiny of his private life. He’s supposed to be a smart man.

Add in the even more incoherent subplot about the escaped prisoner from Dartmoor prison. None of that made sense; not the purchase of the inn a year prior to the events of the story, not the backstory of how the star-crossed lovers met, not how the prisoner escaped from Dartmoor prison and found his way across the moors to be reunited with his paramour and cousin and their eventual escape to freedom.

There’s also the American war profiteer who helped Captain Trevelyan make a fortune manufacturing substandard munitions that killed more American sailors than the enemy. The American war profiteer’s personal aide-de-camp and quack doctor made even less sense. Why did the war profiteer need him around, other than as a dogsbody? There was mumbled dialog that sounded like they were both in the mafia, but it was unclear.

We also meet the incompetent government clerk who’s looking into Captain Trevelyan’s background to ensure nothing questionable is revealed to the press, thus discrediting the party. He’s not doing a very good job if Captain Trevelyan was a known associate of American war profiteers and he doesn’t know.

Then there’s Charles Burnaby. In the novel, he’s boy-reporter Charles Enderby. The name change was the first step in his complete reworking of motives and backstory. Yet we get no foreshadowing of his dramatic personal life or of his connections to the Trevelyan family.

We get almost nothing of James Pearson’s connection to Captain Trevelyan either. We get even less of a reason for Emily Trefusis to be engaged to James Pearson, boy alcoholic, other than that old standby: He’ll inherit big when Captain Trevelyan dies. Maybe that’s why Emily runs off to Argentina with Violet. She gets the money and the girl and doesn’t have to marry the boy alcoholic.

I could rant on, but you get the picture: This movie was a mess, barely suitable for Timothy Dalton fans. ITV could have saved the cost of his salary and paid for a better script. Or, they could have capitalized on Timothy Dalton and added another twenty minutes of movie, explaining all the subplots and how they connected.

General Information

Based on: The Sittaford Mystery (U.S. title: The Murder at Hazelmoor; novel, 1931)

Run time: 1 hr., 40 min. Subtitles: No

Writer: Stephen Churchett

Director: Paul Unwin

Cast

Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple

Timothy Dalton as Clive Trevelyan
Mel Smith as John Enderby
Jeffery Kissoon as Ahmed Ghali
Laurence Fox as James Pearson
Zoe Telford as Emily Trefusis
James Murray as Charles Burnaby
Rita Tushingham as Miss Elizabeth Percehouse
Michael Brandon as Martin Zimmerman
Paul Kaye as Dr. Ambrose Burt
Patricia Hodge as Mrs. Evadne Willett
Carey Mulligan as Violet Willett
Matthew Kelly as Donald Garfield
James Wilby as Stanley Kirkwood
Robert Hardy as Winston Churchill

Film Locations

The Flower Pot Pub, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (pub exterior)
Dorney Court, Dorney, Buckinghamshire (Sittaford House interiors)

***

Excerpt from Agatha Christie, She Watched by Teresa Peschel. Copyright 2023 by Teresa Peschel. Reproduced with permission from Teresa Peschel. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

New Orleans
August 1831

The worst part of the job was the smell. A decaying human body releases an oddly distinct scent. It is a horrid mixture of rotting eggs and cabbage, mothballs, feces, and an off-putting garlic-like odor, depending upon the gases released at each stage of decomposition. Being an observant sort of chap, Tobias Whitney was well-versed in the stink of human decay able to discern how far along a body was in the process of decomposition based on the particular aroma the tomb was emitting. It might be a cloying reek or a putrid stench. The time of year was a contributing factor. The hot, humid summer months were the worst. So much rotting flesh in one place combined to produce a nauseating medley of noxious aromas so foul that even Tobias, who spent his days in the cemetery, felt his stomach churn as he inhaled the soupy air.

Tobias had smelled foul odors before, of course. Anyone who lived in New Orleans long enough had. At this time of year, the privy behind his cottage was the stuff of nightmares. A body could get used to almost anything, though. Tobias had taught himself to focus instead on the delicate, honeyed scent of the flowering sweet olive bushes planted in the courtyards of homes all through the Vieux Carré, or the French Quarter as the Americans called it, for the express purpose of making the stench of so many privies in such close proximity more bearable.

Similar aforethought had gone into the landscaping at St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, where Tobias had been sexton for nearly three years. Unfortunately, the ethereal scent of fragrant flowering bushes and trees planted along the perimeter and throughout the cemetery grounds was far too subtle to mask the stink. It invaded his nose and marched its way down to his mouth. He let out a breath he’d been holding and put his sleeve against his nose as he inhaled. He spit to rid himself of the foul taste. Both actions proved futile. It was no wonder. The body interred within the tomb he was cleaning had been laid to rest less than a year before, and the tomb's inhabitant to his right was an even fresher burial.

As sexton, he was responsible for maintaining the cemetery. Some months were busier than others, and August was keeping him at sixes and sevens, between all the yellow fever burials and the rains making a mess of the cemetery pathways. The cemetery had flooded recently, causing the crushed oyster-shell gravel to flow in rivulets between the above-ground tombs and collect in the lowest spot. Unfortunately, the lowest spot was the site of a recently built tomb.

The cemetery consisted mainly of above-ground tombs, whose care kept Tobias busy, though he remained fascinated by the structures. Above-ground burials were the custom here, in part due to the French and Spanish colonists who settled in New Orleans, and for more practical reasons. Guthrie Toups, the octogenarian and retired sexton whom Tobias replaced, had justified the tomb burials in the most colorful fashion.

“These tombs are your bosom friend.” He had waved his gnarled hand about, indicating the structures surrounding him, as he shuffled through the cemetery with Tobias on one of his final days on the job. “Smell like shite in summer but keep the floaters pinned down.” When Tobias failed to comment, Guthrie explained.

“Used to be, I worked at St. Peter Street Cemetery. All those souls went right in the ground. Two times I recall the rainwaters floodin’ the place somethin’ fierce. Coffins poppin’ up like gophers in springtime. Some washed down the street, right up to folks’ houses. When the lids came off, now that was a sight!” A shudder wracked Guthrie’s gaunt frame, rippling through his threadbare coat. “Took us weeks to round up the coffins. And then to find out who belonged where! Can’t put a body back in a hole when you don’t know who he is and which hole is his,” Guthrie shook his head. “Damn shame. You think lookin’ after these tombs is trouble until you gotta put coffins back whence they should never have been disturbed.”

Guthrie, who insisted on being called by his Christian name, had been gone from the cemetery for three years and from the world for two. Technically, he had never actually left St. Louis No. 2. He was enjoying his eternal rest, only one row of tombs over from where Tobias was currently toiling. Tobias considered whether Guthrie’s take on the tradeoff of floaters versus smell was valid. “Shite” seemed far too euphemistic a way to describe what was assailing his senses. Had the souls surrounding him been laid to rest underground, there would be no discernible odor, even in the August heat. However, in addition to being above ground, the vaults in St. Louis No. 2 were not airtight, a necessity since exposure to the elements ensured the bodies would decompose in a timely fashion. Following the bevy of recent rainstorms that Tobias’s wife referred to as “gully washers,” an additional component of stale, stagnant water added to the cemetery effluvium.

"God's teeth!" declared Tobias in frustration, blowing out a breath of putrid air as he gazed at the dispersed gravel and mud piled up along the front and sides of the low-lying tomb. He continued raking, attempting to redistribute the mud-soaked mess along the paths that separated the tombs. It was slow going. The puddles of standing water made the task challenging, and, of course, another drenching rain would produce a similar mess. It was the sort of mindless labor that allowed a person time to think, though Tobias, as of late, preferred not to indulge his brain in aimless wandering. It inevitably led back to dark and painful places. Instead, he compensated by replacing his internal monologue with the voices of others, imagining how they might describe what he was presently seeing. It engaged his mind and allowed him to distance himself from his thoughts. He often remembered the tombs' description, construction, and proper care, as Guthrie had first explained them to him. Even now, he could so vividly recall the old man’s gravelly voice, brittle as the oyster shells underfoot.

“Needed these tombs, the city did. So many coming to New Orleans after Jefferson bought her up, and so many dying here. Nowhere to put a cemetery unless you want to go digging graves in a swamp!” His guffaw had echoed off the tombs.

When Guthrie first began his tutelage, Tobias doubted that he could absorb any new information, so clogged was his brain with other thoughts. Still, the details distracted him. He yearned to learn all he could about the cemetery and the tombs where the bodies rested. He was fascinated, he feared morbidly so, with the amount of sadness one place could contain within its walls. Tobias could sense the pain and loss felt by the loved ones of St. Louis No. 2’s inhabitants, the heaviness of their collective grief threatening to crush him at times. He felt the familiar weight bearing down on him as he looked to his left, at the open tomb whose faceplate had been removed in anticipation of its next occupant, a newly deceased young woman who would be interred there tomorrow. The tomb was empty now, as she would be the first inhabitant.

He took a moment to wipe his brow and allowed himself to be transported back to the first time he had viewed an open tomb.

“‘Nother good thing ‘bout tombs is how many bodies you can stuff inside,” Guthrie had explained.

Tobias had to bend his lanky frame nearly horizontal to match the smaller man’s permanently hunched posture, but by doing so, he could peer into the yawning darkness of the tomb, the unnatural stillness of the space raising the hairs on the back of his neck.

“This one’s a single vault,” Guthrie said. “When the first one of the family dies, we put him in there, coffin an’ all. When the next one goes, that first one gets taken out of the coffin, and what remains of him gets put down in the caveau.” He motioned to the dark, far reaches of the tomb, beyond and below, where the coffin was to be placed. “And so it goes ‘til all the family is holed up in their tomb together. Here’s hopin’ they get along, cuz that’s some close quarters!” Guthrie punctuated this with a cackle and a bony elbow to Tobias’s ribs.

Guthrie’s litany of anecdotes and explanations encompassed nearly every inch of St. Louis No. 2, including the perimeter walls of the cemetery itself, comprised of stacked tombs that Guthrie had told him were called ovens.

“Cuz they look like ovens put one atop the other, and they heat up the bodies faster than cookin’ ‘em. That’s a good thing when you need to get a lot of bodies buried all at once.”

Guthrie’s mood had turned somber, the smile leaving his face. “I can remember stacking bodies up in ‘24 and ‘25 when Yellow Jack came for so many, and there was nary a place to put ‘em. Brought ‘em to the cemetery by the cartload and dumped ‘em right outside the cemetery gates, they did. Left those poor souls rotting in the sun, spreading their miasma over the city like a damned blanket. Least these ovens do the trick!”

The thought of yellow fever victims drew an involuntary shiver from Tobias, even this day, in the summer heat. Guthrie’s voice in Tobias’s head was sometimes the only company he had, not that he was complaining. Tobias craved solitude and was thankful to have this job. It paid a decent wage, enough for his family to live simply but comfortably, and perhaps best of all, it allowed him time to read.

He looked wistfully at his favorite reading bench, positioned in a particularly serene spot deep within the cemetery. The only sounds were the cooing of doves and the whining buzz of cicadas, so incessant this time of year as to become background noise. He felt the book’s weight in his pocket, ever-present and beckoning him to take a break. His vision blurred. He wiped the sweat from his forehead yet again to prevent more of it from dripping into his eyes. He yearned to lose himself, if only for an hour or so, in the all-absorbing action-adventure stories he loved so dearly. For the past few years, escaping from the world had become necessary for his survival. Strange, he often mused, that spending his days surrounded by the dead would be the only way he could cope with the living. Strange, but understandable, given what happened to him three years ago.

With a stubborn shake of his head, he said aloud, though no one else was around, “Not ‘til I put this tomb to rights.” Most families who owned vaults cared for them or paid the cemetery to perform the maintenance, which at the very least required replastering and whitewashing the brick from time to time. Even though the cemetery was relatively new, consecrated only eight years ago, he could already see the ravages the subtropical climate wreaked on those tombs without a caretaker to maintain them.

“Orphan tombs, these ones are,” Guthrie had said of the tombs left to crumble. “Got no livin’ kin to care for ‘em.” He had shaken his head, the wiry gray hairs swaying with the movement. “A whole family gone and no one to remember them.”

Tobias considered Guthrie’s words as worked this day. As he raked, he looked over his shoulder at one such orphan tomb and read aloud the inscriptions on the faceplate, “Constance Bulwark, born 1770, died 1824. Faithful wife, loving mother. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ Jeremiah Longstreet, born 1758, died 1827. Honest in labor, kind in spirit. May his soul rest in peace.” To preserve the dignity of the inhabitants within, he cleaned and made minor repairs to the orphan tombs, though it was technically beyond the purview of his duties. “You’ll not be forgotten,” he assured them before turning his attention to the task at hand.

The tomb before him was not an orphan, as the cemetery was contracted to maintain it, but it might as well have been. Its inhabitant had received no visitors since he was laid to rest. Still, this particular tomb had intrigued Tobias since its construction last November. Like most in St. Louis No. 2, it was brick. While not as extravagant as some tombs Tobias had seen, he found the elevated parapet facade aesthetically pleasing in a simple, elegant way. However, the feature that most fascinated him was the nameplate commemorating the occupant, Dominique You. You was a Freemason, as such, his tomb sported the square and compass symbol prominently carved into the top of the marble nameplate. Below the name was an inscription in French. Tobias was Irish and could not discern the writing, but he knew from the accounts he had read in the papers that the inscription was from Voltaire’s La Henriade:

Intrepid warrior on land and sea

in a hundred combats showed his valor.

This new Bayard without reproach or fear

Could have witnessed the ending of the world without trembling.

Dominique You was an infamous privateer and, some say, the half-brother of the notorious pirate Jean Lafitte. Tobias had read all about the adventures of the two buccaneer brothers in the weekly broadsheets he purchased. Lafitte had been killed in 1823, the same year St. Louis No. 2 opened. But while Lafitte’s whereabouts in the years before his death remained a mystery, Dominique You had lived out his final years in New Orleans, keeping a tavern and serving on the city council. He may have been a privateer, but he was also a war hero, having served valiantly as a gunner in the Battle of New Orleans, warding off a British invasion of the city by commanding a company of artillery composed of fellow pirates.

Stories about Dominique You and Jean Lafitte were legendary around New Orleans and made the adventure novels Tobias read pale in comparison. Tobias vividly recalled his excitement when Dominique You was buried right in front of where he was now standing. Although You died in a state of penury, the people of New Orleans did not forget his heroism. He was given a lavish funeral at the Cathedral of St. Louis, with full military honors, the likes of which the city had seldom seen. Throngs of mourners had followed the coffin to the cemetery. As the sexton, Tobias had been there to witness it all.

Many brought flowers to lay on his tomb, chrysanthemums or early-blooming camellias. Others brought magnolia leaves, fashioned into wreaths or dried herbs tied into bouquets with bits of ribbon or string. There were also rosaries, little vials of holy water, candles, and voodoo tokens left on You’s tomb. The mourners were as varied as the offerings they brought, well-dressed gentlefolk alongside the more common sort. They were all here for the same reason: to pay their respects to the man who helped save the city from the British fifteen years before.

Tobias had caught snippets of conversations all around the tomb. One, in particular, stayed with him. A group of rough-looking men, ill at ease in their mourning attire, had gathered at You’s tomb.

One of the men said, “Sailed with him, I did. No finer man you'd want at your side when things turned hairy. I’d trust him with my life."

"As would I," his mate agreed. "Fought beside him, too. Best cannoneer I ever saw. That’s why the general said he’d storm the gates of hell with Dominique as his lieutenant!”

Tobias had been particularly impressed with this, considering General Andrew Jackson was now president of the United States. He watched as they poured a slug of rum next to the tomb. It soaked into the gravel, leaving the scent of molasses and cloves lingering in the air like a final tribute. Tobias wondered with a shudder if these men were pirates themselves.

He’d had little time to dwell on it, as a Mason engaged him in conversation shortly after Tobias overheard this exchange. The man donned a fine wool suit, well cut and fashionable, with a frock coat that gracefully skimmed the back of the knees of his trousers. Tobias usually donned a working man’s attire for his days in the cemetery, loose-fitting tweed trousers and a jacket, although on this day, he donned a suit. It was one he used to wear as a shop owner before he became a cemetery sexton, though now he donned it only for Sunday Mass. His wife, Mary Catherine, would have his hide if he showed up to work on the day of an interment of such prominence in anything less. Tobias felt rather nattily clad until he beheld the sartorial superiority of the man. Despite their difference in clothing, the Freemason was eager to engage Tobias in conversation, and Tobias found this agreeable.

Funny how he spoke to almost no one these days, save his family and his close friend, the proprietor of his beloved bookshop, Chapter and Verse. Yet within the walls of the cemetery, he came back to life, if only for a short time. He felt at home here as much as he did in his cottage on Bienville Street. Though he knew precisely why this was, he found it a disconcerting aspect of his personality that he was more comfortable with mourners than with those unaffected by death.

“Not a business in New Orleans stayed open today. Everyone’s here to pay their respects,” the man told Tobias. “I suppose you heard the cannons fired for him?”

Tobias assured him that he had, and added that he’d also noticed the flags flown at half-mast.

The Mason nodded.

“He was a proud man, Dominique You.” The man seemed uneasy in the cemetery, as Tobias found most people to be. He suspected the Mason’s attempts to converse stemmed from a compelling need to fill the silence. Tobias noticed the man’s unconscious fidgeting with the intricately designed collar that nestled just below the tie on his starched white linen shirt, the adornment an indicator of his status among the Brotherhood. He spoke with a French accent, and his eyes told the story of a man who accepted the inevitable tribulations of life while still finding joy in living. Tobias was immediately envious of him.

“Had not a penny to his name at the end but did not tell a soul of his troubles.” The man gazed wistfully at Dominique’s tomb.

Tobias would have left him to his thoughts, but he continued. “We would have come to his aid, I can assure you of that. But Dominique was never one for charity. Tough old sailors rarely are. At least we could honor him in this way.” With a tip of his top hat by his white-gloved hand, the man moved on, presumably finding Tobias too taciturn.

Yet for all the military fanfare and grandeur surrounding the funeral, now, a mere nine months later, the tomb lay quiet. Tobias had seen no visitors at the tomb since that day. Dominique You had never married, and although he had been a rather upstanding citizen in the twilight of his life, he did not appear to have close friends, at least not that Tobias had seen. Close friends visited a grave from time to time, but not even his brothers from the Masonic lodge had come. And those had been the folks most upset by his death, at least if public grieving was any indication. Then again, Tobias had seen a lot of grief in his tenure at the cemetery, and it had been his observation that even members of the sterner sex could make an enormous fuss over the coffin and then never come back.

The people who looked the most distraught, as if they did not care to go on living, usually got over it by morning. It was the ones who never took their eyes off the coffin, even as it made its way into the vault, that you could be sure would put flowers there for years. Real grief was mostly invisible. It consumed a person from within, leaving only an outer shell that appeared to the world as a whole being, but was hollow inside. Tobias ought to know. He recognized it in others because he was just a shell himself.

Tobias wondered once again why the Freemasons had chosen this spot for You’s tomb. It seemed a poor location in the cemetery to build a tomb, but it was not Tobias’s place to say so. It was kind of the Freemasons to construct it for their brother, even if they had decreed it was to be sold in fifty years. This stipulation did not surprise him, as he knew people sometimes purchased tombs this way. The odd part to him was that an entire tomb would be dedicated to only one person when many held multiple family members.

Tobias would have thought a single man with no surviving family, and one who did not have much money, would not need a whole tomb to himself. But perhaps his contribution as a war hero had moved some hearts to loosen their purse strings and fund this stand-alone vault. This was a monument to Captain Dominique You, and Tobias would do his part to honor his memory by mucking out the mess around the man’s final resting place.

He finished raking the gravel around the front, repositioning it as best he could amid the puddles that stubbornly lingered even with the scorching August sun. Now he moved to the side of the tomb, where the ground was slightly lower, causing even more water to pool. He could not do much else until the water drained, which might take a while in New Orleans. In the meantime, he could wipe away some of the mud that had splashed onto the tomb from the rainstorm. He pulled a clean rag out of his pocket and decided to concentrate on the nameplate on the front of the tomb.

It was then that Tobias noticed the oddest thing—the marble plate was not flush against the bricks. Tobias chided himself for not observing this before, but as he studied it closely, he realized that it appeared to be placed properly from the front. It was not until he looked from the side that he could see the marble stone was bowing. This was indeed curious, as he himself had placed the outer tablet. As sexton, it was part of his duties to affix the plate upon the bricks after the body was interred and the tomb bricked up.

He had seen marble bow when exposed to extreme heat, but thick nameplates typically did not deform so quickly. It was a blessing in disguise that the rain, which would inevitably flood the cemetery in the summer months, had necessitated him spending time around this tomb, allowing him to observe it more closely. Had the Freemasons chosen a more optimal spot to place the tomb, it might have been many years before he had noticed this subpar workmanship. And since the inhabitant had no living family members, it might not have been until the fifty years were up and the sexton opened the tomb for a new burial that the faulty nameplate was discovered.

But surely, he would have noticed if something was amiss with the marble. He leaned in for a closer inspection and blinked rapidly. He thought perhaps it was a trick of the bright sunshine, but as he stared at the marble slab, he discerned a hairline fracture running the length of the stone. Dominique had been interred less than a year ago. This nameplate should not display such signs of degradation. Had he somehow damaged the stone when bolting the nameplate onto the brick vault? Utterly perplexed, Tobias pondered what he should do. He was exceedingly curious whether his workmanship was to blame for the bowing and cracking or if it was a defect in the stone itself.

He knew he should probably wait until he had help, but his inquisitive nature got the best of him, and he rushed off to retrieve his wrench. Removing the large bolts holding the nameplate in place would not be an easy job to perform by himself. He half-expected that he would not be able to loosen them at all, but was relieved and more than a bit surprised to find them coming loose without even having to apply heat. He knew the stone would be too heavy to maneuver on his own, but he planned to slide it down to the ground once it was free from the brick on the front of the vault. With less effort than should have been required for such an undertaking, Tobias freed the marble slab and eased it down about a foot until it rested upright against the tomb. To conduct a proper inspection, he would need to see the back of the slab. The stone was indeed heavy and should have been cumbersome for two men to handle, yet Tobias was able, with some difficulty, to lay the slab on the ground so that the back was visible.

He instantly understood why he was able to maneuver it unassisted. The back of the marble had been carved out, and the stone, too thin in the center to withstand the intense heat, had bowed as a result. The thinned-out stone also accounted for the hairline fracture Tobias had noticed. This nameplate was not the solid, thick slab he had affixed to Dominique’s vault nine months ago. The slab had been altered and reattached, unbeknownst to him. Tobias did not need to ponder why someone had done this because nestled within the carved-out space was a book.

***

Excerpt from Lafitte Lives by Christi Sumich. Copyright 2026 by Christi Sumich. Reproduced with permission from Christi Sumich. All rights reserved.