Word: dillmouth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book is much more an English gothic romance than a mystery. Gwenda, a dim young woman orphaned as a toddler and brought up by relatives in New Zealand, arrives back in Britain with her new husband, Giles. No sooner have they bought a nice house in the town of Dillmouth than Gwenda starts getting attacks of déjà vu and is clutched by a nameless dread while descending the stairs. It is soon clear to the reader, and eventually even to dim Gwenda, that she has been here before. Just as predictably, as a tiny child...
Luckily for everyone, she is distantly related to Miss Marple. The old lady turns up in Dillmouth, and sternly leads Gwenda through the complexities of her past-most of them available to any reader who looks up the quotation from The Duchess of Malfi that the author drops like a stone early in the story...
These doings might be supportable if Giles and Gwenda had only bought property in Miss Marple's home village of St. Mary Mead. Indeed, the biggest mystery about Sleeping Murder is the author's choice of setting. Sturdy though she is, Miss Marple seems off balance in Dillmouth, away from her cowslip wine, her knitting, her garden and especially her friends...
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