{"id":3852,"date":"2020-11-02T04:34:19","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T12:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3852"},"modified":"2020-11-02T04:35:37","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T12:35:37","slug":"anthony-horowitz-moonflower-murders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/anthony-horowitz-moonflower-murders\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Horowitz: Moonflower Murders"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This book will be published on November 10, 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is every bit as delicious a reading experience as Magpie Murders<\/em> (2018).\u00a0 I really wasn\u2019t sure how Horowitz was going to manage a second book, as several of the main characters in the first one are dead or heading that way at the end of the novel.\u00a0 But Anthony Horowitz is one of the smartest writers working right now, and this sequel to his (in my opinion) classic Magpie Murders<\/em> is every bit as good as the first one.<\/p>\n

The main character is editor Susan Ryeland, who has given up her successful career to head to Crete and help her partner run a small hotel there.\u00a0 It\u2019s not going well.\u00a0 The hotel is having trouble and it\u2019s a mountain of work, so when Pauline and Lawrence Treherne appear asking for Susan\u2019s help in locating their missing daughter back in England, she readily agrees, especially when they sweeten the pot by offering her \u00a310,000.\u00a0 She\u2019s tired of Crete, she needs the money, and she takes the offer.<\/p>\n

Why<\/em> they offer Susan money is trickier \u2013 to explain, at any rate.\u00a0 Susan had been the editor of the hugely successful author, Alan Conway, whose creation, Atticus P\u00fcnd, sounds very much like Hercule Poirot. He\u2019s intelligent and sees things others do not, and he always solves the crime.\u00a0 The Atticus P\u00fcnd books are set in the 50\u2019s, but Susan and the late Alan Conway exist in the present.\u00a0 The Trehernes think Susan can find their daughter because, as Alan\u2019s editor, she was most familiar with his work, and shortly before she disappeared, their daughter insisted that one of the P\u00fcnd books showed her the answer to a murder that took place in the hotel the Trehernes run, on their daughter\u2019s wedding day, eight years ago.<\/p>\n

Susan checks into beautiful Branlow Hall and begins to familiarize herself with the death of Frank Parrish, who was brutally killed with a hammer in room 12 almost a decade earlier.\u00a0 No one is pleased to see her except for the missing woman\u2019s panicked husband, but none of the people she talks to can see how the case of Frank Parrish can be solved by reading a crime novel.\u00a0 True, the novel is also set in a hotel, one Alan Conway visited, and features a murder, but the similarities seem to end there.\u00a0 Or do they?<\/p>\n

While Horowitz brilliantly sets up the\u00a0 mystery that Susan is investigating in the present, she finally must return to the book she edited all those years ago to see if she can discover what clue the missing woman found that seems to prove the accused killer is innocent.\u00a0 So, in the middle of what is actually a quite compelling story, Horowitz inserts the entire book – Atticus P\u00fcnd takes the Case <\/em>\u2013 and dares the reader to solve the case along with Susan.<\/p>\n

This is clever and could be heavy handed but it turns out that the novel within the novel is every bit as interesting as the central one, and I was quickly drawn into the second story.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s jarring when an author attempts something like this, but I was as easily transported by Atticus P\u00fcnd\u2019s story as I was by Susan\u2019s.\u00a0 Horowitz has kept the framework of the hotel for his second book but changed many of the details, while still including cruel and thinly veiled portrayals of the people Susan is investigating.<\/p>\n

This novel within a novel is placed in the middle of the book, and the tone \u2013 before and after \u2013 changes as far as Susan is concerned.\u00a0 In the first part she\u2019s unsettled and confused, in the second, her mind is clear and she becomes focused and sure.\u00a0 She does manage to solve both cases \u2013 that of the missing woman, and that of the eight year old murder.\u00a0 The clues are fiendishly clever and while I saw they were there as enumerated by Susan in her classical drawing room summing up with all suspects present, I didn\u2019t see them as I inhaled each of the stories.<\/p>\n

Throughout this updated version of a golden age novel there are clever nods to detective fiction, a genre Horowitz obviously loves and reveres.\u00a0 He has added to its luster with his contributions, both Susan Ryeland stories being, to me, instant classics.\u00a0 You\u2019ll want to re-read this one.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This book will be published on November 10, 2020. This is every bit as delicious a reading experience as Magpie Murders (2018).\u00a0 I really wasn\u2019t sure how Horowitz was going to manage a second book, as several of the main characters in the first one are dead or heading that way at the end of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[264,455,6,454,453,456,452],"class_list":["post-3852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-anthony-horowitz","tag-atticus-pund","tag-british","tag-harper-collins","tag-moonflower-murders","tag-susan-ryland","tag-traditional-detective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3852"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3854,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852\/revisions\/3854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}