On the morning of her return to her party, Miss Marple learns Miss Temple had been injured by a rockslide during the previous day's hike, and was lying in a coma in hospital. On talking with the servant, Miss Marple learns Verity joined the family after both her parents died, becoming quite attached to Clotilde.
Touring the grounds, Miss Marple notices a creeping plant about to bloom, polygonum baldschuanicum covering the wreck of the greenhouse. She then meets Lavinia's spinster sisters, Clotilde and Anthea Bradbury-Scott. Miss Marple accepts Lavinia's invitation. Her next clue comes from Lavinia Glynne Rafiel had written to Mrs Glynne and her two sisters before his death, suggesting Miss Marple spend the most physically challenging few days of the tour with them at the Old Manor House. Another member of the tour group, Miss Cooke, is a woman she had met briefly in St Mary Mead. Elizabeth Temple is the retired school headmistress who relates the story of Verity, who was engaged to Rafiel's ne'er-do-well son, Michael, but the marriage did not happen. She begins by joining a tour of famous British houses and gardens with fifteen other people, arranged by Mr Rafiel prior to his death. Miss Marple receives a letter from the solicitors of the recently deceased Jason Rafiel, a millionaire whom she had met during a holiday on which she had encountered a murder, which asks her to look into an unspecified crime if she succeeds in solving the crime, she will inherit £20,000.
Recent analyses of the plot and characters in this novel find homosexual themes, but the character "Miss Marple seems to view the passionate friendship between women as just a phase in their life", which was "a conventional view, held by people of Marple's generation and social class. A later review by Barnard is the only negative note, stating "The garden paths we are led up are neither enticing nor profitable," and Barnard rates Christie's later novels generally not as good as earlier ones. The novel is "readable and ingenious" and "Miss Christie remains unflagging" at age 80. It is a "first-rate story" in a "traditional detective novel". It was described as "astonishingly fresh" with a "devilish fine" confrontation and overall was "quite worthy of the Picasso of the detective story". Nemesis received generally positive reviews at the time of publication. In his will, Rafiel leaves another mystery for Miss Marple to solve. Miss Marple first encounters Jason Rafiel in A Caribbean Mystery, where they solve a mystery. It was the last Miss Marple novel the author wrote, although Sleeping Murder was the last Miss Marple novel to be published. The UK edition retailed at £1.50 and the US edition at $6.95.
Nemesis is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie (1890–1976) and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1971 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.
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