Miss Marple learns that Carrie Louise has experienced health problems incidental to old age. One of the first people Miss Marple encounters is Edgar Lawson, a young man acting as a secretary to Serrocold Lawson shows clear signs of paranoid schizophrenia, but these are largely ignored. Stepsons Stephen and Alexis Restarick, now grown, are frequent visitors and are present during Miss Marple's visit. Daughter Mildred Strete moved back home after she was widowed. Carrie Louise has her family living with her, as her granddaughter Gina has brought her American husband Walter to England to meet her family. She is impressed by the size of the Victorian mansion, which now has a separate building for delinquent boys, the cause which engages Carrie Louise and her third husband, Lewis Serrocold. She asks Miss Marple to visit Carrie Louise at Stonygates, her home in England. While visiting her American school friend Ruth Van Rydock in London, Miss Marple learns that Ruth is seriously concerned for her sister Carrie Louise. A later review considered that this novel showed 'Definite signs of decline' and felt the author was not entirely comfortable with the setting she described in the novel. One review at the time of publication praised the essence of the plot but felt the latter half of the novel moved too slowly. The book features her detective Miss Marple.

The US edition retailed at $2.50 and the UK edition at ten shillings and sixpence (10/6). They Do It with Mirrors is a detective fiction novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1952 under the title of Murder with Mirrors and in UK by the Collins Crime Club on 17 November that year under Christie's original title.

They do it with mirrors joan hickson