Magpie Murders is unlike anything you’ve read before. It’s a book within a book, a murder mystery within a murder mystery. A thrill ride within a thrill ride.
Susan Ryeland is a book editor in London, for the small publisher Cloverleaf Press. One of her most popular authors is a mystery author named Alan Conway who writes about a private detective named Atticus Pünd. The novel opens with Susan warning readers that this book changed her life, referring to Magpie Murders, Conway’s latest—and last—novel about Atticus Pünd.
She received Conway’s latest novel on a Friday, and went home to read it. And from there we are transported to 1950s England, to the small village of Saxby-on-Avon, where a woman was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs, dead. The doors were all locked. Was it a terrible accident that killed her, or was it something more sinister. Days later there is a burglary. And a couple of days after that, a brutal murder. We follow Atticus Pünd as he chases down clues and puts the pieces of the puzzle together. And just as we’re about to find out the answers to all the crimes, we are shifted back to modern-day London.
The last chapters of the book are missing. Susan thinks it’s probably just an oversight, and the missing pages are at the office somewhere. She heads to Cloverleaf to look for them, but she hears the news on the radio: Alan Conway is dead. She understands that the missing chapters are not a mere mistake, but they could be related to Alan’s death.
As she tries to find those missing pages, to find the answers to Pünd’s mystery, she starts gathering questions of her own about Alan’s life, his friends, and his death.
Magpie Murders is a wild ride through two different mystery novels, showing the fine line between fiction and reality (or maybe just more realistic fiction), and offering up some insight into the mind of a mystery writer. Anthony Horowitz has created a meta-mystery, a book within a book, and I absolutely loved every minute of it!
I listened to the audiobook for this one, and the narrators were fantastic. Allan Corduner took me straight to 1955 Saxby-on-Avon to bring detective Atticus Pünd to life. And Samantha Bond is an ideal Susan Ryeland, chasing the final mysteries of Alan Conway’s final book and his death. I adored this novel, well, both novels, and while I kick myself for not figuring out the mystery, I wouldn’t have changed anything about the crazy ride I took through Magpie Murders.
*originally published June 10, 2019
