ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Sleeping Murder

How long does it take to read Sleeping Murder?

Agatha Christie

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie takes about 4 hours 26 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

Book 12 of Miss Marple

Previous: Nemesis

About 4 hours 26 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1940. 242 pages, about 66,550 words.

9 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 24 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 26 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 46 minutes

The page count is the median across 118 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"Let sleeping murder lie": this is the proverb (a variation on "Let sleeping dogs lie") which is not obeyed by twenty-one-year-old New Zealander Gwenda Reed, who has recently married and now comes to England to settle down there. While her husband, Giles, is out of the country, she buys a house for them and starts recalling memories which make her start to think that perhaps she had lived in the house before. She knows the pattern of the old wallpaper they find on the walls, the location of a now covered over doorway, a set of steps in the garden that are not where they should be, and so on. When she begins to remember seeing someone murdered at the bottom of the staircase however, she is convinced she is going mad. Miss Marple however has an explanation not only for why she may be having these memories but also solves the mystery of the murder victim and her murderer. Sleeping Murder chronicles Miss Marple’s final case. Although Agatha Christie wrote it before Nemesis, it was not published until after her death in 1976. It is thought to have been written in the early 1940s, although the exact date has been debated

Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
  • violence

How these are chosen

Subjects: Fiction, Jane Marple (Fictitious character), Women detectives, Women detectives in fiction, Mystery, English Detective and mystery stories

More by Agatha Christie

Books like this

Popular books of similar length