Moonflower Murders
The sequel to major hit BBC series Magpie Murders from the Sunday Times bestselling author
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4.1 • 73 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
*The follow-on from Magpie Murders, soon to be a major BBC series starring Lesley Manville*
'The Lord of television mystery' LA Times
'Easily the greatest of our crime writers' Sunday Times
'Absolutely loved it. So clever, just masterful stuff.' Richard Osman
'Fiendishly clever and hugely entertaining. A masterpiece.' Lucy Foley
‘Anthony Horowitz is an absolutely exceptional writer’ Daniel Mays
'You have to hand it to Horowitz: the guy never fails to deliver a total page-turner. We LOVED it.' Richard & Judy
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Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend. But life isn't as idyllic as it should be: exhausted by the responsibility of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, Susan is beginning to miss her literary life in London - even though her publishing career once entangled her in a lethal literary murder plot.
So when an English couple come to visit with tales of a murder that took place in a hotel the same day their daughter Cecily was married there, Susan can't help but find herself fascinated.
And when they tell her that Cecily has gone missing a few short hours after reading Atticus Pund Takes The Case, a crime novel Susan edited some years previously, Susan knows she must return to London to find out what has happened.
The clues to the murder and to Cecily's disappearance must lie within the pages of this novel.
But to save Cecily, Susan must place her own life in mortal danger...
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'I'm blown away. He's managed to come up with something even more amazing than the last one!' Hideo Kojima
'Horowitz is a master of the cunning plot device, and brings zest and originality to the traditional murder mystery novel.' Sophie Hannah
'A wonderfully enjoyable read' Ragnar Jonasson
'So clever, a story within a story within a story. A triumph.' Kate Mosse
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Readers can't get enough of Magpie Murders . . .
***** 'Six hundred and eight pages? Really? Well they flew past.'
***** ' Highly recommended to all crime fiction and thriller readers.'
***** 'Even better than the first one - just very much my kind of mystery.'
***** 'One of my top 10 books of the year.'
***** 'This is one of the smartest and most entertaining whodunnits I’ve ever read.'
Sunday Times bestseller, September 2024
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Horowitz's masterly sequel to 2017's Magpie Murders finds Susan Ryeland, who misses her previous work as a London book editor and publisher, discontent in her new life running a struggling hotel in Crete. Then she's visited by Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, the owners of Branlow Hall, an upscale Suffolk hotel, who think she can help in finding their missing daughter, Cecily. Cecily disappeared shortly after calling her parents to say that an injustice had been done. At the time of Cecily's wedding at Branlow Hall a decade earlier, Frank Parris, a hotel guest, was bludgeoned to death in his room. One of the staff, Stefan Codrescu, was convicted of the murder based on powerful circumstantial evidence. Cecily told her parents on the phone she was convinced of Stefan's innocence after reading a mystery inspired by the Parris murder by the now deceased Alan Conway, one of Susan's authors. Susan accepts the Trehernes' generous fee and travels to Branlow Hall to investigate, which involves looking into Parris's death and rereading the Conway novel for clues. Horowitz, who matches a baffling puzzle with a sympathetic, flawed lead, has never been better at surprising the reader and playing fair. This is a flawless update of classic golden age whodunits.
Customer Reviews
Excellent writing
Fast, smart and full of interesting plot twists!
Too much of a good thing
Author
British. Extensive bibliography across YA adult and adult fiction (thrillers, mysteries, fantasy, horror, a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels and a James Bond novel) as well as plays for stage and screen, e.g. Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Spielberg’s Tintin, Foyle’s War, Collision, Injustice, New Blood. In Magpie Murders (2016), he introduced 40-ish English book editor turned sleuth Susan Ryeland, who tackled a real life mystery closely related to a mystery novel she was editing. This is what Susan did next.
Plot
Our gal and her Greek schoolteacher BF now operate a hotel in Crete. A well-to-do English couple, who own a luxury country hotel in Sussex, come to visit. One of their daughters has disappeared. The police aren't doing much, and the couple think Susan might be able to help because, before she went missing, said daughter told them she'd worked out the dude jailed for a grisly murder at the family hotel eight years earlier, on her wedding day no less, was framed and the real killer's still on the loose. How did she work this out, you ask? Well, she read a book by now deceased mystery author Alan Conway, who visited their hotel after the crime, heard the story, and used it to craft a mystery novel of his own. Guess who was his editor? For the record, the book's called Atticus Pünd Takes The Case. (Think German version of Hercule Poirot).
So what happens is, our gal flies back to blighty, gets her red MG-B out of storage (it starts straight away after being parked for two years, which makes me think it wasn't really an MG), and toodles off to make enquiries. Many cups of tea and even more red herrings later, she decides she should re-read the above-mentioned book, which Mr H gives us, in it's entirety, in the middle of his own book! (Did I mention this author likes to dabble in metafiction?). Our gal, and we readers, are just as clueless by the end of that part, but she does some more digging, and cogitating, and drinks more cups of tea, and nearly gets killed.
Eventually, she convenes a meeting of the various suspects, and the investigating cop, in a drawing room, or possibly a lounge, in the aforementioned country hostelry. In the tradition of the golden age of British crime fiction (think Margery A, Dame Agatha, G K Chestnut (not his real name) Dorothy L, Dame Ngaio, who was a New Zealander by birth but held joint citizenship), she systematically eliminates candidates based on both evidence and the feelings in her water. (Lucky she wasn't on antibiotics.) The baddie should have been obvious from the start if you ask me, but what would I know?
Narrative
Third person from POV of protagonist
Characters
Marginally updated versions of golden age counterparts. Not a lot has changed in the parts of England where Country Life and Horse and Hound top the magazine sales list. Mr H has come under criticism for being hard on homosexuals (sorry) in the past, and will likely come under more after this.
Prose
Contemporary, but elegant and quintessentially English. My major criticism is there was too damned much of it. 600+ pages! Seriously? Agatha and Ngaio generally had everything done and dusted at 200 and rarely ventured past 220. Obviously, it was two for the price of one here with the novel-within-a-novel thing, but as noted above, our gal didn't come away any the wiser from that. Neither, I suspect, did most readers, including me. I further suspect Mr H was making that very point, because after she carries the day, he has our gal ruminating through a reasonably lengthy epilogue section on all the clues the dead writer left that she didn't pick up the first time.
Bottom line
Too clever by half, and too long by about 100%. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, not everyone is as fond of the golden age of British detective fiction as Mr H obviously is. Me, for one. Those who are, should add a star. (I'm branching out into poetry).