[HarryT]

Just finished "Towards Zero", by Agatha Christie. This was her 42nd book, and the last in which the always likeable "Superintendent Battle" (who first appeared in "The Secret of Chimneys") appears.

The book starts out with a scene in which an old retired barrister is talking to his friends, and saying that a murder is simply the "Zero Hour" (hence the book's title) of a long sequence of events leading up to that murder, following which we have the story of the sequence of events resulting in a murder at a seaside town (and its solution by Superintendent Battle). A very good story, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This is one example of a book which links together more than one of Christie's different detectives, in that there's one scene in the book in which Battle refers to Hercule Poirot, and says that he wishes he had his help in the case, because it's one in which he'd be of great help, with his psychological insights into the mind of the criminal.

I should perhaps add that this was one of those annoying cases where ITV had run out of "Miss Marple" books to produce TV adaptations of, and started inserting her into completely unrelated stories. Miss Marple (Geraldine McEwan) replaced Superintendent Battle in the TV adaptation of this story in 2007.