Despite the author's many mysteries successfully recommended for [young adults, Third Girl] is too tame to hand over to anybody. Norma, an English flower-child type, shares an apartment with two other girls after her long-lost father returns from Africa with a new wife. Norma is always on the scene clutching incriminating implements but with no recollection of events when poisoning, knifing, and murder take place. Hercule Poirot repetitively mulls over the clues, arriving at last at the incredible solution: transformed by a wig, the villainous stepmother is also the third roommate and has been harrassing and drugging the dimwitted Norma. The Third Girl is a bore. (p. 4272)

Miss Christie makes the most of it [in By the Pricking of My Thumbs] of being a woman, of being a country woman, an archaeologist's wife, and now, of being old. Her hero and heroine Miss Christie has resuscitated from the 1920s, her even then tiresome Tommy and Tuppence, now sprightly oldsters. The general theme is senility. (p. 1414)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1968; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), December 12, 1968.