A review by cocoonofbooks
At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie

3.0

When Christie tries to do some different, it can go well (see Cards on the Table) and it go very badly (see The Big Four). This was, in my opinion, somewhere in the middle. Rather than a straightforward murder mystery, it is what appears to be a missing persons case, and then later someone else is killed, but the real mystery centers on the hotel and why something seems just a little off about it. By the time it was all laid out, I had figured out the most obvious pieces of it, though there were still some unanswered questions. Miss Marple plays a relatively small role in this one; she delivers some key observations to the chief inspector, but he's the one we spend the most time with in the latter half of the book. In the first half, we follow a girl who's sneaking around avoiding her guardians. It wasn't one of my favorites, but at least Christie's usual offensiveness was kept to a minimum, which I guess is something.