Book Review: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Magpie Murders

by Anthony Horowitz (Horowitz)

 

Anthony Horowitz is rapidly becoming one of my favorite contemporary mystery writers. In part, because he refuses to play by the rules of modern mystery fiction, and instead reinvents the genre regularly, with most of the novels he’s published in the past 10 years or so.

 

With the novel Magpie Murders, which the members of the libraries’ Just Desserts mystery fiction discussion club read and discussed in March 2021, Horowitz deconstructs the Agatha Christie-style traditional murder mystery, and then rebuilds it with multiple overlapping levels. Magpie Murders is a mystery novel set inside of another mystery novel. Editor Susan Ryeland has handled the cantankerous and pushy author Alan Conway for many years, shepherding his series of Atticus Pund novels (think Hercule Poirot, only German) to the bestseller lists. When his latest — and what he has threatened will be his last — Pund novel is delivered to the publishing office incomplete, Ryeland needs to get the final chapter — only Alan Conway is murdered before she can, falling from the rooftop observation level of his ostentatious rural medieval castle.

 

Magpie Murders features the incomplete Conway novel, surrounded by chapters in which Ryeland attempts to investigate Conway’s death. It turns out that Conway included not-so-loosely fictionalized versions of the many people he had poor relationships with, as suspects in his final Pund story — and identifying who the killer in the seemingly unfinished Pund novel is may be the clue to Ryeland figuring out who had enough motive to kill Conway in “real life”.

 

Filled with innumerable twists and turns, I found Magpie Murders to be compulsively readable, even at over 500 pages. This is not a casual read — clues and red herrings abound, and you have to really pay attention to everything that everyone says and does! Even though I thought I know “who done it” in both levels of the mystery, it still surprised me in the end.

 

Magpie Murders is in the process of being filmed as a six-part British television adaptation (ironic, as one of the plot points in the novel is that a TV producer is negotiating for the rights to adapt the Atticus Pund novels!) Hopefully, it will end up on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery series.

 

[If you enjoy this, there’s already a second novel in this series, 2021’s Moonflower Murders also by Horowitz. This novel will also be most appreciated by people who are already fans of Christie’s Poirot novels and short stories.]

[ U.S. publisher’s official Magpie Murders web page ] | [ official Anthony Horowitz web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

 

Scott read this one for the Just Desserts mystery fiction discussion group discussion online in March 2021. If you're a mystery fan, join us for the next group meeting on July 29th, where we'll be discussing the suspense novel One by One by Ruth Ware. The Just Desserts group has returned to in-person meetings as of June 2021. Join us at 6:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. in the 4th floor auditorium of the Bennett Martin Public Library downtown at 14th & "N" St. on the last Thursday of each upcoming month. For more information, check out the Just Desserts schedule at https://lincolnlibraries.org/bookguide/book-groups/#justdesserts