At Bertram's Hotel

‘'The children of Lucifer are often beautiful.''

Hotels are fascinating places. Well, they can be quite a nightmare if you're careless while booking or if the residents are a bunch of barbarians (which is often the case...) but under normal circumstances, hotels hide hundreds of secrets within their rooms. And the guests just have to mingle with each other. And who knows where all this mingling will lead? In the societies of the past, it would lead to certain, shall we say, questionable situations. And murder. This is the world of Bertram's Hotel.

Our beloved Miss Marple returns to the hotel of her youth to find that very little has remained the same. The world is supposedly progressing but sometimes, this progress is quite dubious. Agatha Christie creates a tangled web of doppelgangers, brave women who love adventure, despairing heiresses, playboys, broken relationships and, obviously, deadly secrets in what I consider to be one of Queen Agatha's finest moments.

The 2007 ITV adaptation, starring the inimitable Geraldine McEwan is exceptional. Quite different from the original material but beautiful nonetheless. Not to mention that Ed Stoppard plays Ladislaus Malinowski and call me shallow, but hey...

‘'I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn't it?''

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/