Classic British mystery writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers have delighted millions of fans and inspired countless writers. I’ve come late to the genre but have made up for lost time, diving in with enthusiasm. When a friend and brilliant reader recommended Anthony Horowitz as someone who draws from those British classics but with a modern twist, I immediately signed on.

Magpie Murders (2016) by Anthony Horowitz is the talented writer’s tale of intrigue involving editor Susan Ryeland, her crime-writing author Alan Conway, and Conway’s detective, Atticus Pünd, “who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages.” As someone who follows the path of those classic mystery writers, Conway has been very successful, even as he has alienated family, friends, and, yes, his editor. Yet Ryeland knows she must put up with his troubling behavior in order to keep the successful works flowing.

Magpie Murders is number nine in the much-loved and bestselling Atticus Pünd series, so Ryeland is excited to get the manuscript from Charles—the owner of Cloverleaf Books and her boss—for a weekend review. As she reads through the pages she finds the famous detective in the small, fictitious English village of Saxby-on-Avon working to solve at least two deaths that have occurred at Pye Hall, the ancestral home of Sir Magnus Pye. Sir Magnus, whose head was lopped off, was clearly murdered. But the death of his housekeeper a couple of weeks before in what the police have ruled an accident is more ambiguous. And there is a long-ago tragedy that may also fit into this plot.

Like Ryeland, we are pulled along in reading Conway’s manuscript until she turns the page and discovers that the final chapter is missing. What good is a whodunit without an ending? And then she learns on Sunday evening that Alan Conway has died. Ryeland arrives at the office on Monday morning hoping to find the final chapter. Instead, she discovers many more twists and turns—questions that have her wondering if the final chapter can also help her understand how Alan died. She heads to Conway’s home in Suffolk in search of the final chapter of Magpie Murders. And the truth.

An international bestseller upon its release and then the subject of a Masterpiece Mystery series on PBS, Magpie Murders is a delightful whodunit within a whodunit. Many already know the work, the plot, and the answers that Horowitz has us searching for along two separate timeframes. In the book’s first chapter, Horowitz has Susan bemoaning the fact that she was pulled on this journey. “It was all down to that bastard Alan Conway. I hadn’t liked him the day I’d met him although the strange thing is that I’d always loved his books.”

She was expecting a classic whodunit. “But Magpie Murders wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on Unsplash