Foremost there is Geraldine McEwan, with her delightfully sly interpretation of Christie's spinster sleuth, Jane Marple, from the village of St Mary Mead. So far, it's most tempting and performance driven to the end, for there is pleasure to be gained spotting a string of familiar faces from a sumptuous array of acting talent. Gwenda Halliday (Sophia Myles), engaged to a millionaire, arrives in England from India and wastes no time buying Hillside, an imposing house in Devonshire where strange things start going bump in the night. Sleeping Murder makes an intriguing start. In this new version (it was originally filmed in 1987 with Joan Hickson), the story sometimes drifts in the shallows but this beautifully mounted production always maintains its good looks. Here, in the last of her 66 detective stories, published soon after her death in 1976, she was at it again. Agatha Christie enjoyed assembling all her suspects in one room and then picking off the loose threads until she revealed the poor wretch who dunit.
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