"A Murder Is Announced" ushers in a wonderful parade of English village characters, which gather together to a most unusual invitation -- on Friday at 7 pm there will be a murder in Little Paddocks. It seems like a bad hoax - until the murder really happens.
If there was one Miss Marple novel to be chosen as the most ingeniously put-together plot, it might well be this one. The aforementioned first murder, meanwhile, is not the last. Miss Marple is fortunately on hand to stop murdering and divulge the true nature of tragic events that shake one home in that little English village, with the repercussions from a few years ago, during the war.

What "improvements" have been made for the Black Dog & Leventhal edition? There are already major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the Signet, Bantam, and Berkley editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED was published for the first time in 1950. It was adapted for the stage in 1977 by Leslie Darbon :Agatha Christie's "A Murder is Announced" (Adapted for the Stage).

I can't but recommend this book that presents one of the most inventive mysteries ever concocted by Agatha Christie. For once, if you're very careful, it's possible to find the murderer before the last ten pages of the novel because all the clues are given by the smart Lady of the Crime. As always in Agatha Christie novels, light notes about the English social and political climate spreaded all along the chapters allow us to better imagine the everyday life in an English little town some five years after the end of WWII.

A book for your library.