Review (3/5 Stars):
This is my first Agatha Christie book and I had really high hopes for it. I don't know if it was just this particular book but I was a bit disappointed as everyone painted Agatha Christie to be the best mystery author of all times. They Did It With Mirrors is your typical who-dun-it mystery novel and I actually figured out quite early on (before the real detectives were called in) who the murderer was. I did like how Miss Marple sorts out her thoughts to the readers so that we can either follow along or see if our own conclusions match the detective's. Perhaps she was hyped up so much that I was expecting too much, I dunno but I will give Agatha Christie another try.
Synopsis (SPOILERS):
Miss Marple is persuaded by her friend Mrs. Van Rydock to go and stay at her sister's Youth Centre because she has a premonition that there's something wrong about the place and the people in it. According to Mrs. Van Rydock, her sister Carrie Louise's life had been pretty eventful. At a young age, she married Gulbrandsen, who had 3 grown boys and a huge sum of money. Together, they adopted a beautiful daughter (who later died in childbirth, leaving Carrie Louise with a granddaughter who lives with her) and had one of their own (a more homely girl, who also lives with Carrie Louise after being happily married and widowed). After Gilbrandsen died, Carrie Louise married husband #2, who left her with his 2 grown boys, one still visits during the holidays and the other is a permanent resident visit. It was husband #3, Lewis, that persuaded her to do something with Stonygates to help educate the less fortunate and that was how they ended up with a juvenile delinquent centre in their giant home.
Upon arrival, Miss Marple was greeted by two people, Edgar Lawson (an delinquent turn help for Lewis), and Carrie Louise's granddaughter, Gina. Gina is portrayed as a spoiled and self confident new age girl and Miss Marple's early discussions with Carrie Louise, we can already see that she gets quite a bit of attention from the men. We meet a whole slew of characters once Miss Marple arrived Stonygates, including Carrie Louise's housekeeper Mrs. Bellever (who seems to adore Carrie Louise to an unexplainable degree), Wally (Gina's American GI husband), Stephan Restarick (her step-son by husband #2 who now lives with her), Mildred (her daughter who grew up in the shadows of her beautiful adopted sister) and a bunch of doctors and hired help. Of all the people, Miss Marple is convinced that there's something off about Edgar Lawson but she doesn't know what - other than finding out that he has some sort of mental disorder where he believes that his father is famous and everyone's out to get him because of it. Then when you think that you've met everyone, Christian Gilbrandsen, Carrie Louis step son from her first marriage shows up unexpectedly asking after her health and has an urgent conversation with Lewis.
That night after everyone's had dinner, Christian leaves to write a few letters and Edgar blows up and accuses Lewis of being his father and conspiring against him. Lewis calmly takes him into his office, located off of the dining room to talk. The electricity goes out and in the mess, everyone just sits and listens to the argument going on inside of Lewis's office. All of a sudden, they heard a shot fired and a couple of minutes later, 2 more shots. Finally, Mrs. Bellever goes and finds the spare key, they open the room to find Edgar cowarding in the corner but lucid now and feeling remorse for trying to shoot Lewis. Later on, they find Christian had been shot and the detectives are called in to find out who did. Lewis tells everyone at this time that Christian came to talk to him because he felt someone was trying to poison Carrie Louis. The detectives question everyone, some multiple times and everyone is puzzled who would want to kill Carrie Louis. Miss Marple eventually figures out that the poisoning story was just to throw everyone off the right track and Lewis had killed Christian because of financial reason.
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