Other editions of book 4:50 FROM PADDINGTON

For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth McGillicuddy witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman's throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away.Elspeth was not a woman usually given to hallucinations, yet it appears that no one else witnessed the murder, no one reported it, and no corpse is found. That's when Elspeth turns to her old friend Jane Marple to help solve the puzzle and unmask a murderer.

This stunning baffler about a murder without a corpse is "the most delicious bamboozling possible... all adeptly managed to keep you much too alert elsewhere to see the neat succession of clues that catch a murderer we never so much as thought of" - James Sandoe "The great mistress of the last-minute switch is at it again in this story." -The New Yorker

Elspeth McGillicuddy, an old friend of Jane Marple, comes to meet Jane from Scotland. While travelling by train, Elspeth sees a murder occurring in a train on a parallel track. Since she could not have seen the victim or the killer and she is an old woman, the police ignore her. Only Jane believes her, but can she prove anything when there is not even a dead body present?