When the deeply unpopular Colonel Protheroe is found shot dead in the vicar's study, half of St. Mary Mead seems to have wanted him gone - and several people even confess. It falls to the village's sharpest-eyed spinster, Miss Marple, to see past the obvious suspects and untangle a plot built on secrets, adultery, and clever misdirection. The novel that introduced one of crime fiction's greatest detectives.