Book #14: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was looking forward to reading this book for ages.
The book "Magpie Murders" introduced the character of published Susan Ryeland, who becomes an unwitting detective after events in the narrative start to mirror the recent book by Alan Conway, an author she works for.
This book opens with Susan on holiday in Crete, but returning to investigate a historic murder that one of Alan Conway's previous books appears to have been inspired for. Apparently the man arrested for the murder was innocent. To complicate things, the woman who started to suspect his innocence after reading the book has now gone missing.
Like the previous title, the narrative turns into a novel-within-a-novel as Susan starts to read Alan Conway's book, meaning that the reader gets to read more about his detective character, Atticus Pünd. The embedded narrative revolves around the murder of an actress, and has characters who are conspicuously based on the people who Susan is investigating. This took a while to get into, and there was at least one chapter that felt like padding, although that might have been a deliberate move by Anthony Horowitz. One of the later chapters is divided into sub-chapters, which Susan later criticises as being inconsistent with the rest of the narrative.
I worried at first that maybe the embedded narrative format didn't feel fresh any more, but I found myself enjoying it towards the end, and then a couple of plot twists close to the end of the main narrative kept me guessing.
A dramatisation of Magpie Murders is going to start over here in the UK next weekend, and hopefully this novel will also be picked up.
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