Alan Conway is a bestselling author, his much loved detective Atticus Pȕnd, is a hit and readers can not get enough of his crime solver skills in sleepy 1950s Britain. But with his latest novel, the mystery doesn’t just happen within the pages of a manuscript and murder becomes very real indeed.
I loved this novel within a novel. A really good twist on the murder mystery, and in Magpie Murders, you seem to get two for the price of one. The character of Atticus could have jumped out of the pages of an Agatha Christie, I actually enjoyed this as a stand alone story. It is an excellent homage to the old English whodunit and Horowitz captures the period feel of the Christie-esque novel. The mystery that runs alongside it, the death of Alan Conway is just as intriguing. Susan Ryland, the head of fiction at Cloverleaf books, who publish the Atticus Pnd series is the driving force. It is her journey we follow, when she suspects that something is afoot, especially as the last two chapters of the manuscript of Conway’s latest novel have strangely gone missing. Alan Conway is an intriguing character, though we never get to meet him, we learn about his character through his family and business associates. Though initially his death is deemed a suicide, it seems there are several suspects who would like to see this award winning author dead. Horowitz kept me guessing till the last few chapters.
I enjoyed Horowitz’s twists, and the concept of two stories running alongside each other, with one providing clues. It seems writers have their own secrets and often it’s within their writing that they bury them for anyone clever enough to uncover them.