The Cracked Mirror
The award-winning, brain-twisting mystery
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3.8 • 30 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
***Winner of the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Book of the Year***
** Shortlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2025**
FORGET WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW
THIS IS NOT THAT CRIME NOVEL
You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.
You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.
Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide. It starts with a dead writer and a mysterious wedding invitation. It will end with a rabbit hole that goes so deep, Johnny and Penny might come to question not just whodunnit, but whether they want to know the answer.
A cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly, The Cracked Mirror is the most imaginative and entertaining crime novel of the year, a genre-splicing rollercoaster with a poignantly emotional heart.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It sounds like the setup of an old joke told around a bar: an ageing female sleuth and a gritty homicide detective accidentally walk into the same crime novel. But that’s entirely the fun of Christopher Brookmyre’s meta murder yarn, which takes supreme pleasure in upending genre tropes. Following in the self-aware footsteps of the Knives Out movies and such likeminded books as The Woman in the Library, the award-winning The Cracked Mirror forcibly collides the familiar worlds of writers like Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly in a way that actually refreshes some of those time-honoured storytelling conventions. And don’t be surprised if you end up enjoying the chalk-and-cheese pairing of protagonists Penny Coyne and Johnny Hawke as much as you do some of their famous ancestors.
