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After 50 years away, cunning and perceptive sleuth Miss Marple has once again found herself at the scene of a crime.
The elderly character at the center of many Agatha Christie whodunits is tasked with solving a new case in Lucy Foley’s latest mystery “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel,” out Sept. 22. Christie is also listed as an author.
Set at a secluded resort in Switzerland, the Grand Alpine is practically cut off from the outside world, only accessible via a gondola ride during particular hours of the day. And it’s precisely there that the book begins. The prologue opens with the line:
The gondola rises silently through the bank of clouds into the frozen world at the top of the mountain.
Foley tells TODAY.com the eerie, chilling setting was the perfect place to make Miss Marple — who last appeared in a novel in Christie’s 1976 work “Sleeping Murder” — the “beating heart” of the story.
The bestselling British author behind “The Guest List” and “The Paris Apartment” grew up a fan of Christie, discovering one of her detective novels on a bookshelf in a cottage when she was just 12. She devoured more stories but she didn’t appreciate Miss Marple’s character, she recalls.
It wasn’t until she re-read some of Christie’s novels that she admired how the writer took an “underdog character” and made “her a master sleuth with a brain to rival Sherlock Holmes.”
“It was so clever, and it still feels radical even today,” Foley says. “I think we still have an issue with older women being perceived as invisible or less capable in some way. I still think she has something to teach us.”
In 2022, Foley was asked to contribute to a collection of 12 new Marple stories, alongside Leigh Bardugo, Ruth Ware, Jean Kwok and more. When she was approached again about the character, this time for a full-length novel, she jumped at the opportunity.
“In 2026, we need a new kind of superhero. We’re surrounded by these male egos and these men rewriting history to further their own ends. I love thinking, ‘What would Miss Marple make of them, and how would she thwart them?’” she says.
Still, she initially felt the pressure of doing the character justice. But once she had her premise — Miss Marple on a holiday to the Swiss Alps in the 1950s — she entered her creative bubble and started plotting the mystery.
“It felt like quite a haunted time in many ways because there was this long shadow of the Second World War. I wanted that to be something that I contrasted with the glamour,” she says of the setting of “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel.”
She also knew how she wanted to structure the novel. Fans of Foley’s other books will know that the writer tells each chapter from a different character’s first person point of view. With Miss Marple, though, she decided readers wouldn’t hear the inner workings of the detective’s mind.
“I knew that I couldn’t have her perspective because that would feel like a real Christie anachronism,” she says, laughing. “Because I think the really interesting thing about Miss Marple is she’s quite enigmatic, and she doesn’t actually necessarily reveal a lot of herself.”
The character works best as an underestimated observer, Foley shares, and she wanted to keep her that way. She read, and re-read, Christie’s books to nail Miss Marple’s tone and mannerisms. She also watched the British television series.
“There were two things that I knew I had to get right for this book before I brought in any of my own sort of creative sensibilities, and those were the Christie plotting… (and) also Miss Marple. So I wanted to get her on the page as closely as I possibly could to Christie’s Miss Marple,” Foley says.
Beyond that, she says she had “some license” to bring in her own voice and style.
“I wanted it to be a book that was in conversation with the original Miss Marple,” Foley says. “They didn’t want to present it as a kind of Agatha Christie forgery.”
With those goals in mind, Foley plotted out the entire book before she started writing, a change to her usual process.
While Miss Marple isn’t mentioned in the prologue, she is quickly introduced in Chapter 1, which is told from the perspective of Diana Glass, described as “the help.” Diana meets Miss Marple and describes her as a “the perfect image of a little old lady — almost too perfect, in fact.”
“I wanted, through Diana’s eyes, a reader who’s familiar with Miss Marple to recognize this character that they know and love. But also a reader coming to her completely cold, not knowing much about her, to quite quickly get a sense of who she is through Diana’s perspective,” Foley says.
Readers then meet more characters who will all become suspects in the death of the unnamed person found in the gondola. Miss Marple must suss out the culprit before they commit their next crime.
“As a reader of murder mysteries, I love this sense of the past catching up with people and people not getting away with things when they shouldn’t,” Foley says. “But I also love this idea, chaos is then going to be resolved for you at the end. There’s a nice wrapping up and a nice sense of resolution. I think that can be quite soothing and satisfying in troubled times.”
It’s all set up in a prologue, which Foley says was the first scene she thought of when she started writing.
“The first scene that came to me was the gondola going up the mountain,” she says. “The set piece of someone getting into the gondola alive and well at the bottom, and being found dead at the top.”
Get a taste of the mystery below.
Read the Prologue of Lucy Foley’s ‘Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel’
9:25 a.m.
The top of the Grand Alpine gondola
Swiss Alps, 1950
The gondola rises silently through the bank of clouds into the frozen world at the top of the mountain. It is a wonder of modern engineer-ing, gliding between stanchions drilled into ancient rock, the red lacquer of its body gaudy against the bleak palette of white and gray.
There’s someone in the gondola. One of the hotel guests, most likely, eager to make the first tracks of the day. Fresh snow fell last night, leaving a pristine covering of powder over the mountain and softening the glacier that sweeps down one side. In the early morning light, it gives off a nacreous glow. Faint bluish indentations on the surface whisper of hidden, lethal chasms beneath.
In the tiny cabin beside the lift the attendant stamps his feet in his boots, blows on his hands to keep warm. He’s looking forward to interacting with another human being, however briefly. It’s a lonely existence up here with only the eagles for company, the only sounds the otherworldly groaning and cracking of the glacial ice as it con-tinues its endless creep toward the town. He knows the fears of his ancestors, how they believed in malign mountain spirits and giants living among these peaks, why they shunned them as a place of dark magic. Sometimes— when the seracs fall with crashes that seem to echo infinitely among the surrounding rock, or when a winter storm crackles with purple lightning, or when the low growl of an avalanche sounds at a distance— he’s not completely sure he doesn’t believe in such things himself.
The shadowy figure in the gondola sits with their head thrown back against the rear window; perhaps in awestruck appreciation of the view. The mechanism grinds to a halt. The doors begin to open. The seated figure does not move.
The attendant peers through the cabin window. Are they asleep? Are they not intending to get out? Perhaps they’ve come up here for the sights and will simply stay put and travel back the way they’ve come. More snow is on the way, after all: a great deal of it.
And yet . . . there’s something odd. A peculiar stillness about the scene. The attendant feels that he is just as alone as he was before the gondola and its occupant emerged through the clouds.
Should he go and see?
He doesn’t want to see.
He’s struck by the sudden impulse (odd; he’s a good Swiss Prot-estant) to cross himself.
Just as he steps out of his cabin into the freezing air the gondola gives the mechanical shudder that locks it into the final position. This is when the seated figure falls, stiff and inert as a Dresden doll knocked from a mantelpiece, keeling face- first onto the metal floor of the cabin.
For a moment the attendant watches in horror. Then he springs into action. But he knows, even as he hastens along the ice- slick path, that it is no use. The gondola’s passenger is already dead.