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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9359162" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Finished Ngaio Marsh's Death At the Bar, which I believe leaves me with just three of her books left to read for the first time.  This is the the fourth "new" (as in unfamiliar) one I've plowed through in a row, the third one where the solution was obvious from very early on, and the third where the killer was (gasp) someone who had a previous conviction for a crime.  And the other newbie was, predictably, a case of the social outcast and "designing woman" being the killer, because it certainly couldn't be the British gentry like every other suspect.I'd been fairly neutral about her mysteries before this, but getting a concentrated dose of just plain bad books has really lowered my opinion of her quite a lot.  It's not even a matter of them being a phase, with these four being written over a period spanning more than forty years.  She's simply bad at telegraphing the murderer based on their background/social class and too prone to skimping on making her mystery mysterious.Marsh often got compared favorably to Christie in the old days when both were more relevant, but I just don't see it.  When Aggie botched a plotline (which certainly happened) it wasn't often because the killer stood out in a crowd, and her detectives generally had enough personality to at least make it a satisfactory read regardless.</blockquote>