Continuing with our reading books in the house that look like they would be good to read but not necessary to keep, my wife pulled The Body In The Library from the Agatha Christie box and we read it. This was the first of her books featuring Miss Marple that we’ve read.

It’s a good book, as all of hers have been. A servant, in the midst of her morning duties, finds a body in the library of a manor house. She tells the lady of the house, who doesn’t believe her at first. Finally the lady goes downstairs and sees for herself. Before long the police are called. The lady knows Miss Marple, who is from that village, and calls her to come over. She arrives before the police do. Her reputation as an amateur crime solver is already well established in the village, which seems to have an above average murder rate for cute English villages.

Since Miss Marple will be the one to solve the crime, I figured the murderer had to be someone she comes in contact with. She’s there at the manor house and encounters three people, plus the police. The story then moves away from Miss Marple and follows the police as they do their work. The dead woman is identified as an 18-year-old professional dancer at a hotel in a nearby town. She’s newly studied at a dance school. Her older cousin has a solid position as a “mingler” with the guest of the hotel, dancing and playing bridge and being friendly with the guests, who are mainly upscale tourists.

Miss Marple has a number of other contacts. A retired Scotland Yard man is called in on the case, and he knows and thinks highly of Miss Marple. It isn’t long before another woman is found murdered—or presumed murdered—in a burning car. When this happens, Miss Marple is then certain who committed the first murder. Actually, she was pretty certain of it even in the first meeting at the manor house.

My main complaint about this book is it was difficult to tell how much time passed from one event to the next. Most of the action took place in the same day, or at least I think it did. Yet, there seemed to be too much going on for it to be happening in one day. Perhaps a second read would help sort that out.

I did not have the murderer correct. My thought process as to who it would be was correct, but I chose the wrong person. In my defense, the clues were not as well laid out in this book as they were in the previous Christie books we read.

I give it 4-stars. A good read, well worth the time it took. It’s not a keeper, however. I see no chance of ever reading it again.

Some books you read you remember very well, some books you forget almost entirely. Some books you sort of remember, but can’t figure out specifics. Assumed Identity by David Morrell is in the later category.

David Morrell taught a half-day class on fiction writing at a writer’s conference I went to in 2006 in New Mexico. As chance would have it, he and I wound up at the same table at lunch and we had a good conversation. Many people don’t know his name but you know his most famous character: Rambo.

I read Assumed Identity in 29 sittings in August and September this year. My paperback is exactly 500 pages, so my reading averaged 17 pages per sitting. Not bad, but I’ve done better.

The book is about a man who worked in Army special forces, in a task group that tried to infiltrate and then root out drug lords in various places. Some of his assignments may have been with other situations as well. It was kind of hard to understand all his backstory. In this book he had six or eight different identities as situations unfolded. One mission went awry when, through bad luck, someone he’d know a few identities prior ran into him in Mexico when he was trying to infiltrate a drug organization. Four drug lords/their body guards turned on him. He killed or wounded all of them, was wounded in the gun fight then again in his escape.

But escape he did—not once, but multiple times in the book. His work was perfect. He approached each situation kind of like a Jedi knight in Star Wars, you know how they seemed always confident, always ready in every situation, always undaunted when taking on multiple enemies, alway having the right equipment, the right stamina, and oodles of mental tenacity. That was the protagonist in this story.

Through most of the book he was worried about a certain woman he had worked with a few identities ago, as he received a note from her to meet at a certain place at a certain time in New Orleans, which was an indication she was in trouble and needed his help. With considerable difficulty he got to that place, but something bad happened and he didn’t see her, being injured in a knife attack. Later, he becomes involved with another woman, a newspaper reporter, who was trying to make a name for herself by exposing this secret army operation.

As I’ve been writing this some of the details of the book have come back to me, such as the next-to-last plot twist that was very major. Such as the destruction of an archaeological site in the Yucatan Peninsula by one of the world’s wealthiest men looking for oil, an operation that kept being mentioned in seemingly meaningless chapters that finally came together in the end.

This was a good book. It blended together Army operations, secret missions, civilian news, petroleum, drugs, and archaeology, with much action. I recommend it to anyone who likes a good action book.

As to the question of whether I’ll keep it or not: no, I won’t. I have around five or six Morrell books. This was the last one to read. I’m going to put them together in a lot and sell them on Facebook Marketplace. Perhaps a David Morrell fan will see it and want them. If not, after a couple of months, I’ll just mix them in with the 500 other books I’m currently trying to sell. I think, among my David Morrell reads, this was my least favorite. Still I’m going to give it 4 stars. It lost a star for a few confusing parts.