The murder of Colonel Protheroe -- shot through the head -- is a shock to everyone in St Mary Mead, though hardly an unpleasant one. Now even the vicar, who had declared that killing the detested Protheroe would be 'doing the world at large a favour, ' is a suspect -- the Colonel has been dispatched in the clergyman's study, no less. But the picturesque English village of St Mary Mead is overpopulated with suspects. There is of course the faithless...

This collection of twenty stories features Miss Jane Marple, the famous amateur sleuth who bases her solutions to crimes on past experiences and on an insistence that human nature is the same everywhere--Novelist.

Miss Marple is vistiting a friend when a secretive visitor is murdered and anyone could be the killer.