Moonflower Murders

 By Anthony Horowitz

Harper Collins    2020

608 pages     Mystery

I am ashamed to say that I had never read any Anthony Horowitz, even though I had Magpie Murders, the first of this particular 2-book series, on my shelf for a couple of years. Not sure how I missed reading it, because I absolutely loved Moonflower Murders. But, oh my goodness, is it ever complicated—and long! When you read a book on a Kindle, you have no idea how long the book is, so I was quite shocked when I saw that I had just read a 600+ page book. Actually—two books, for Moonflower Murders is two books in one.

Here is the basic plotline.

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is living the good life. She is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend Andreas. It should be everything she's always wanted. But is it? She's exhausted with the responsibilities of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, and truth be told she's beginning to miss London.

And then the Trehearnes come to stay. The strange and mysterious story they tell, about an unfortunate murder that took place on the same day and in the same hotel in which their daughter was married—a picturesque inn on the Suffolk coast named Branlow Hall—fascinates Susan and piques her editor’s instincts. 

One of her former writers, the late Alan Conway, author of the fictional Magpie Murders, knew the murder victim—an advertising executive named Frank Parris—and once visited Branlow Hall. Conway based the third book in his detective series, Atticus Pund Takes the Cake, on that very crime. 

The Trehearne’s, daughter, Cecily, read Conway’s mystery and believed the book proves that the man convicted of Parris’s murder—a Romanian immigrant who was the hotel’s handyman—is innocent. When the Trehearnes reveal that Cecily is now missing, Susan knows that she must return to England and find out what really happened.

When Susan gets to the Branlaw Hall hotel, she reads Atticus Pund Takes the Cake once again to see what Cecily discovered during her reading of the book, but the clues aren’t so obvious to Susan. So, then, we are compelled to read this Agatha Christie-style mystery with a Hercule Poirot-type detective. Astoundingly, the entire novel can be found within the pages of Moonflower Murders, every last page, including the table of contents and the dedication page. I was so shocked when I got to the title page of Atticus Pund Takes the Cake, I had to go back to the table of contents of Moonflower Murders to see what was going on. After I read the Atticus Pund mystery, I still couldn’t figure out who had murdered who—in either case—when I returned to the Moonflower mystery.

And this is where I had trouble. There is a huge cast of characters in both books, and because the whole thing is 600+ pages long, I had trouble getting back into the Moonflower Murders section, not remembering all of the characters and their names. I spent the next 50 pages or more just trying to get everybody straight. This, however, did nothing to waylay the brilliance of the book or of the author. Apparently Horowitz has used this book-within-a-book technique in other books, most especially Magpie Murders, which, of course, I didn’t read. (I might suggest that you read it before you read Moonflower Murders.)

Although I knew who Anthony Horowitz is, I had never read any of his books. I knew about the Alex Rider series, and the Foyles War TV series, but when I looked up his output, I found that he has written several books every year since the 1980s, when he was just a young man. I also found while searching my Advanced Reader data base that I had missed reading The Sentence is Death and The Word is Murder in addition to The Magpie Murder, all of which are on my Kindle.

I am astounded at Horowitz’s productivity as well as his expertise. Moonflower Murders is mystery writing at its best.

Here is the review in the New York Times. The book has made many of the lists of 2020’s best books.