Misha Crews

In these days of social distancing and long grocery lines, it’s important to find comfort and peace wherever we can. Curling up with a good book is wonderful under the best of circumstances: in stressful times like the one we’re living through, it becomes even more important.

Like many readers, I adore Agatha Christie. She had that unique gift of drawing us into a world with a minimum of words. Her writing is clean and smooth and beautifully British. She makes complex knots with memorable characters, and yet her language is always deceptively simple. She is my very favorite writer of all time.

And what could be more comforting than disappearing into Saint Mary Meade, where Jane Marple always knows the truth about every situation? She can serve you a nice cup of tea, perhaps a morsel of seed cake, sweetly explain what happened to Mrs. Price-Ridley’s gill of pickled shrimp and disclose who dumped a body in Colonel Bantry’s library.

Below are pictures of some of my favorite Miss Marple books, with a little bit about each one in the captions.

What fiction stories do you read when you want some comfort?