Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

For all you Baroque lovers out there (of which I am one) here is one by Georg PhillipTeleman:  his Suite for Flute and Orchestra in A Minor.  Jean-Pierre Rampal is the soloist and conductor; the orchestra is the Jerusalem Music Center Chamber Orchestra.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I rarely read modern mysteries. There is usually too much perfunctory sex, violence and language. I understand that for some people that makes the novel, but I prefer good writing.

However, I really enjoyed Foyle's War on TV and Horowitz was the screen writer so I was willing to give his novel a try. Do I like it as well as my long time favorites written in the first half of the twentieth century? Not really. Did Horowitz write a good mystery. Yes, I would say so. There were things I liked and things I did not like.

Before continuing know that I am going to be providing a few spoilers, not the murderer(s) or anything, but plot developments that you might not want to know before reading the book for yourself.

First a summary: Susan Ryeland is an editor for a publishing company and has settled down in her apartment for the weekend to read the latest murder mystery from one of their authors.

As the reader, I found this mystery interesting, even if the characters were a little flat. Everybody was unpleasant except for the detective, Atticus Pund and his assistant Jason Fraser. Even so, the story moved along and I was looking forward to finding out "whodunnit".

But this is not to be. The last chapter is missing. Ryeland is as disappointed as we are and tries to contact her publisher as well as the author to find out where the rest of the story is.

That Monday when she gets to work she finds out that the author, Alan Conway, is dead from an apparent suicide. Ryeland finds herself examining Conway's suicide letter and the circumstances and arrives at the conclusion that he did not necessarily kill himself, that there is good chance he was murdered.

So we leave the first mystery and spend the middle part of the book running around with the editor as she attempts to uncover this second mystery. In the end, both mysteries are solved.

What I liked? Both mysteries were pretty good. Overall I enjoyed reading it. Interestingly, the characters in the second mystery were more interesting and likeable than the ones in the first mystery. They seemed to have flesh and blood while the first ones seemed gray and unreal.

Was this on purpose? It's a clever bit of writing if it is.

What did I not like? I was enjoying the first mystery and just when we arrive at the conclusion, we are jolted out of that reality and into a "greater" reality, the one where we have the author who supposedly wrote the first story and now a second mystery. I really did not enjoy that and frankly, maybe it is an original idea, but it added nothing to either story, in my opinion.

Horowitz also includes sections with different styles of writing, showing us what is good writing and what is bad writing. While I admire his ability, this felt a little bit like showing off. He even has two scripts of the same story, showing how one man wrote it badly and another one wrote it well.

Other than the jarring experience of the fourth wall of a fictional story being suddenly removed, the stories were good.

But I'm going back to my Stout, Sayers, Tey and Vickers.



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