Lucy Foley Sends Miss Marple to the Swiss Alps in First New Mystery in 50 Years

Miss Marple is leaving St. Mary Mead. Lucy Foley, author of The Guest List, has written Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, the first new Miss Marple mystery in 50 years, placing Agatha Christie's elderly amateur detective at a Swiss ski chalet full of hidden speakeasies, ice-skating waiters and unforgiving mountainsides.

Foley told Condé Nast Traveler that the Christie estate asked for her own take rather than a paint-by-numbers Christie. She chose to send Marple on another holiday-she only gets one in the original books-and to answer the rugged 1950s action thrillers of Ian Fleming and Eric Ambler by putting two little old ladies, Marple and Mrs. Bantry, at the center.

Research trips took Foley to Chamonix, Zermatt, St. Moritz and Italian resorts. A stay at the Refuge du Montenvers, reached by a little red train above Chamonix, directly informed the hotel in the book, and old photographs of black-tie waiters performing tricks on the ice at St. Moritz hotels made it onto the page.

Set five years after the Second World War, the novel gathers Italians, French, British, Americans and Germans on the train up the mountain, bristling at being cheek by jowl with former enemies. Foley said the region's porous mountain passes fed into her characters' wartime backstories.

Christie, who died in 1976, once explained that a good detective story must point to somebody obvious who could not possibly have done it-though really, of course, he had.