The Body in the Library is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in May of the same year. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence. The novel features her fictional amateur detective Miss Marple. The novel concerns the murders of two girls of outwardly similar appearance. One of them was an 18-year-old dancer, and the other was a 16-year-old Girl Guide with aspirations to an acting career. The identities of the two victims were deliberately left ambiguous by the killers. Jane Marple eventually discovers that the dancer was the intended adoptive daughter and heiress to a wealthy man. She starts suspecting the other potential heirs to the old man's fortune. While the prologue is set at St Mary Mead (the setting of the previous Marple novels), the novel's main setting is a seaside resort hotel. Robert Barnard praised the novel for its relative realism, comparing it with the lack of realism in a similar novel by P.D. James. Source: Wikipedia (en)