On her own terms, she mostly is. The setup is a real Christie engine: an isolated luxury hotel high in the Swiss Alps, reachable by a single winding railway, filled with guests who each have a reason to be angry at somebody else, and then a body, and then a blizzard that removes any possibility of leaving. The classic-crime blog Classic Mystery was gripped throughout, calling the plot clever and the sort of thing Christie would do, with clues fairly laid for the reader, and that is the correct compliment for this kind of book.

Where it diverges is in the telling, and that is also where my reservations sit. Foley is a much more generous describer than Christie, and reviewers have noticed. The blog Debbish put it plainly: she is more wordy than Christie, particularly when describing the lavish hotel, its surrounds and snowfields, enough that the reviewer found herself skimming. The same review notes that Foley deliberately misdirects several times, perhaps too many ultimately. Both are fair, and both are the kind of thing the original never allowed herself: Christie was famously stingy with scenery and misdirection had to pay rent. Here the atmosphere is a genuine pleasure and a genuine tax on the middle of the book, and how you feel about that will decide how you feel about the novel.

The production, though, is a real asset. Hayley Atwell, Mara Wilson, Adeel Akhtar, Lucy Boynton and Hugh Kermode split the cast, and hearing distinct voices for a cast list this large makes the suspects far easier to keep straight than they would be on the page. There is also a short note from Foley on why she took the job, and after the Guardian piece it lands as more than publicity. If you like Christie at all, the estate's earlier continuation novels are worth pairing with this, and the site has both ends of it: The Guest List from Foley's own backlist and And Then There Were None from the original.