

Miss Marple suggests that Gwenda lived in England with her father and his second wife, which proves to be the case. She has memories of being on a ship, but it is clearly two ships. Her father died a few years after her mother. Gwenda was born in India where her father was stationed, then raised in New Zealand by her mother's sister from a toddler, once her mother died. During the play, The Duchess of Malfi, when the line "Cover her face mine eyes dazzle she died young" is spoken, Gwenda screams out she saw an image of herself viewing a man saying those words strangling a blonde-haired woman named Helen. She goes to London for a visit with relatives, the author Raymond West, his wife, and his aunt, Miss Jane Marple. Further, a place that seems logical to her for a doorway between two rooms proves to have been one years earlier. When the workmen open a long sealed door, she sees the very wallpaper that was in her mind.
She forms a definite idea for the little nursery. She supervises workers in a renovation, staying in a one-time nursery room while the work progresses. In a short time, she finds and buys Hillside, a large old house that feels just like home. Newlywed Gwenda Reed travels ahead of her husband to find a home for them on the south coast of England. Miss Marple aids a young couple who choose to uncover events in the wife's past life, and not let sleeping murder lie. The story is explicitly set in 1944 but the first draft of the novel was possibly written during the Blitz in 1940. Released posthumously, it was the last published Christie novel, although not the last Miss Marple novel in order of writing. The UK edition retailed for £3.50 and the US edition for $7.95.

Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple's Last Case is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in October 1976 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.
