Author:Anthony Horowitz
This is the third in the series of murder mystery novels featuring Susan Ryeland and Atticus Pund. Although it works as a standalone work in its own right, it’s more enjoyable if you have already read the two previous novels in the series, Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, so that you’re familiar with the main players and their back stories. (Just a warning though that the solution to the first novel is revealed here.) The basic premise in all three stories is that a ‘real life’ murder occurs in the life of an author, and the clues to solving it are to be found in the manuscript of a novel said author is writing featuring the fictional detective Atticus Pund, a Poirot like figure, and that Susan Ryeland is in the process of editing. It’s a very clever idea, and it’s one that works very well. There’s lots of fun to be had trying to establish which fictional characters are representations of real world people, and in trying to spot clues to what’s going on which are hidden in the form of anagrams. To give a brief précis, a final Pund novel, set in the South of France, is being prepared with the characters thinly disguised versions of the author’s own family, and with lots of parallels between the present and the past and the fictional world and the real world. Believing his mother, a best selling children’s author, to have been murdered twenty years previously, he decides to hide the identity of the person he believes to be the murderer in his own novel, inadvertently making both himself and Ryeland targets for the killer. This is a really enjoyable and exciting read with an ingenious and entertaining plot that keeps you guessing until the very end, and you’ll be doing well if you can pick up on all the clues while avoiding the numerous red herrings along the way.
Length of Read:Long
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
Highly recommended for lovers of crime mysteries, or of course those who enjoyed the previous two novels in the series.
One thing you’ve learned
The preceding two novels have already been adapted for television, and hopefully this one will follow suit.
According to an interview with Horowitz in the i
Wow you do like these murder mysteries!
This is good news. Anthony Horowitz is an author I enjoy a lot and these books are smart and fun. Have it in the Audible library poised as soon as finish Careless People (or why you probably shouldn’t trust or like Facebook).