Moonflower Murders

There’s truly no better way to kick off the ~holiday season~ than with a meaty murder mystery. I have long been a fan of Anthony Horowitz (from his Alex Rider days, the teen spy YA series), and I’ve loved his recent pivot to mysteries (The Word Is Murder, The Sentence Is Death, and Magpie Murders).

This is the second in his “Susan Ryeland” series, about a book editor who solves a mystery related to the murder mysteries she edited by an author named Alan Conway. (Conway died in the first book in the series.) Susan is now living in Crete with her fiancé, until one day, a wealthy couple show up, telling her that their daughter, Cecily, has disappeared. The last thing Cecily told them was that she read an Atticus Pünd book (by Conway) and an 8-year-old murder at their family’s hotel finally made sense to her. So Susan agrees to return to England to try to understand what Cecily realized after reading Conway’s novel, which was based on a murder that happened at the hotel. It’s full of twists and turns, and it even includes a murder story within a murder story — Horowitz decides to include the fictional Conway novel in full (just over 200 pages), which I found a little tedious but ultimately rewarding. Two books for the price of one, as a Washington Post review pointed out! And, they wrote, “Moonflower Murders resembles a super Mobius strip, interlacing multiple degrees and levels of fictiveness. Susan’s story, for instance, seems ‘realer’ than Alan Conway’s novel, though both were created by Horowitz, who draws on his own life for certain plot details.”

It’s a hefty book — 608 pages! — but perhaps it’s because there is so much going on. And though I was skeptical of the inclusion of the Conway novel, I honestly loved every chapter of the whole thing. A delightful British mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Rating: ★★★★