I picked Agatha Christie’s Nemesis nearly at random of my “audiobooks” playlist; I’d recorded it a while ago and didn’t remember a thing about the premise. So it was a nice surprise to find a strong opening hook: Jason Rafiel, who Miss Marple met on a prior case, has died, leaving her a large sum of money—if she’ll solve a mystery for him. He’s not going to tell her about the mystery, but information will come her way, and their code word will be “Nemesis,” which is a reference to the prior case. (Of course, in the radio play at least, no-one ever uses a code word, so it feels rather contrived.)
At this point, I was quite interested, but as the adaptation continued, I began to have some misgivings about this premise. Mr. Rafiel posthumously maneuvers Miss Marple into places where she can learn about the mystery, forcing her to find out everything herself, and I found myself tempted to conflate him with the author—and then I got annoyed with him and Christie for withholding information and making us jump through hoops. It’s hard to tell from the adaptation how much Mr. Rafiel knew or suspected about the mystery; maybe he guessed a lot and was directing Miss Marple accordingly, or maybe he was just spectacularly lucky.
This is probably one that’s better read, though for subtler reasons than the my previous quibbles with the adaptations for radio.