The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

Guests saw Ruby as late as 11 pm dancing with George Bartlett, but Ruby did not appear for her dance demonstration at midnight. Josie Turner, an employee at the hotel, identifies the body as that of her cousin Ruby. Hotel guest Conway Jefferson reports Ruby Keene, an 18-year-old dancer at the Majestic Hotel in Danemouth, as missing.

She shares these observations with Dolly. Miss Marple notices that the appearance of this girl is not right, from her bitten fingernails to her old dress. Haydock’s autopsy reveals that the young woman, healthy but not fully mature, died between 10 pm and 12 midnight the previous evening, had been drugged and then strangled, and was not sexually molested. Trying to identify this dead young woman, Melchett heads to the nearby cottage of Basil Blake, but Blake's girlfriend Dinah Lee, a platinum blonde, is very much alive and arrives at the house while Melchett is interviewing Blake. The police investigators include Colonel Melchett and Inspector Slack. Bantry calls Miss Marple, (an old friend of hers). The colonel then contacts the police and Mrs. She had been painted with heavy makeup, platinum-blonde hair, and a silver-spangled dress. He finds the dead body of a young woman on the hearth rug in the library. Dolly Bantry then wakes her husband, Colonel Arthur Bantry to go downstairs. Bantry, “There is a body in the library!” she cries. The novel features her fictional amateur detective, Miss Marple. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence. The Body in the Library is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in May of the same year.

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie