Tag: 4.5 stars

Mystery Summary Alan Conway is a bestselling crime writer. His editor, Susan Ryeland, has worked with him for years, and she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. Alan’s traditional formula pays homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. It’s proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job. When Susan receives Alan’s latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder in an English manor house, Pye Hall, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects, plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan reads, the more she realizes that there’s another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ruthless ambition, jealousy, and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder. Review My first exposure to Anthony Horowitz’s novels was through the recommendation of a co-worker.  He told me about a book he was reading called The Word is Murder, and although I wasn’t really into mysteries at that time, I was intrigued enough to pick it up.  It’s not too much to say that that book was one of my gateways into the mystery genre.  I’ve been following the series ever since (which continued with The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill, and the upcoming The Twist of a Knife). Magpie Murders has been on my to-read list for a while, but it’s only recently that I read it, and I’m a bit ashamed to say that it’s because of TV that I finally did so.  The show Masterpiece Theater has begun running a series based on this book, and after the first couple of episodes, I had to know whodunnit. This book is a two-for-the-price-of-one kind of book: Roughly the first half is a story about a detective named Atticus Pünd and the case involving the murder of a country gentleman, but the second half abruptly moves into the “present day” and follows the editor of the book you’ve just been reading.  Susan Ryeland has realized that the novel is missing its final pages, and so she has no clue who Pünd finally names as the killer.  And as everyone knows, you can’t have a whodunnit if you never find out who done it.  Her quest to find the missing pages is complicated when the author dies, apparently by suicide… or was it? Admittedly, I was a bit taken aback by the fact that the novel doesn’t interweave the stories more, but I can see where the book’s structure wouldn’t work for a TV show.  Once I got past that realization, I thoroughly enjoyed this story.  Pünd comes across as a gentle soul, dedicated to the truth after having seen the ultimate evil in the Nazi concentration camps.  Ryeland, something of an alter-ego for Pünd, is intelligent and driven, and…