Didn't do much for me. The frame story felt gimmicky, and I found myself skimming pages at a time and not missing anything. I never got hooked into either story, and reading felt like a chore after a while. ( )

This is a cosy crime novel with a difference: it begins with the ruminations of a character who used to be a book editor and had received the manuscript of the ninth in a series of cosy crime novels set in the late 1940s - 1955, featuring a German private detective, Atticus Pund. It then launches into the manuscript itself up to the point where it ends prematurely because the final chapters are missing. The initial character, Susan, then embarks on a search for those chapters which morphs into a criminal investigation - because the author, Alan Conway, has apparently committed suicide by jumping off the tower of his country house, but Susan becomes convinced that he was murdered.

And so there is a crime novel within a crime novel, with Susan taking on the role of private investigator in the framing story. She discovers that the process is not quite as easy at it appears to be for Atticus and other fictional detectives, and also that the dead man was not a nice person. Her own private life is drawn into the investigation, and she is due for some sobering realisations before the end.

The interweaving of the two stories - for the resolution of the fiction within a fiction turns out to be instrumental in solving the 'real' crime - is well done and there are also a lot of red herrings and puzzles, because Alan Conway has been playing games all along, such as naming all his characters after birds in the current book or after tube stations in another. And he is fond of anagrams, which eventually reveals a twist in his relationship to his detective character. For he fancied himself as a serious writer, was never able to be published as such, and only found success when he turned to, what were to him, shallow potboilers. He despised his cosy crime novels, his detective and, by inference, his reading public.

I don't know how this would work as an audiobook, as the separation between the various narratives depends a lot on the use of different typefaces, which give a strong visual clue of when there is a switch between Susan's narrative, the novel within a novel (also called 'Magpie Murders'), an apparent suicide letter from Conway, and an afterword within the embedded novel by Atticus Pund's assistant. The embedded novel also has its own page number sequence. The differing type faces are a big help in keeping track.

I enjoyed the book up to a point but it is rather long because of this doubling of novels, and Pund's investigation became quite boring. I couldn't understand why a series of what seemed to be a poor man's ripoff of Poirot would have stormed the bestseller lists. The framing story of Susan's investigation is much more interesting and she is a well developed character as opposed to the cardboard cutout which is Pund. Hence I can only award this 3 stars overall. ( )

I was enjoying this in the beginning, getting definite Hercule Poirot vibes. But 40% through the book, there was an abrupt change in narration, and some back-and-forth after that which kept taking me out of the story.

I didn't appreciate the vulgar and profane language (a lot of f-bombs, especially), or the various sexual references.

The solution to the murders was anticlimactic. I didn't like any of the characters. The book was far too long.

I'm not sure why this has such good ratings, because it was definitely a disappointment to me. ( )

This was fun and clever. It’s a murder mystery within a murder mystery – two detectives – one professional, one an amateur sleuth. The first story feels like an Agatha Christie mystery with two murders, lots of suspects and motives, set in a small English village. The quirky foreign detective is reminiscent of Christie’s Hercule Poirot, but from Germany rather than Belgium. The story begins with the latest manuscript of best-selling novelist Alan Conway being read by his editor, Susan Ryeland.

But just before the murderer is revealed, Susan realizes the last two chapters of the manuscript are missing. And author Alan Conway has committed suicide. Susan is a mystery novel enthusiast in her off hours and is determined to find the missing pages. Her search leads her to suspect that Alan was murdered as she reflects, “You’d have thought that after twenty years editing murder mysteries I’d have noticed when I found myself in the middle of one.”

Frustratingly, no one but Susan thinks Alan was murdered. But with numerous suspects, motives, and secrets, this “real life” mystery is amazingly similar to Alan’s latest novel Magpie Murders.

This novel has been on my TBR list since it was published in 2017. Now I can’t wait to also read Moonflower Murders, and then the third in the series, Mayflower Murders. If you like Agatha Christie mysteries, with clues, twists, secrets, and quirky characters, set in a small village in the English countryside, you’ll want to read this addictive and inventive crime fiction that is an homage to Christie, the queen of mystery. ( )

What a clever book this is. "Clever" seems like such an inane word but Horowitz dazzles with not one murder mystery but two. Bodies are mounting up, the clues seem rather "Little England" to be realistic, and everyone has a motive for at least one murder... (The use of different narrative voice was also clever; I was occasionally infuriated with the tone of the book-within-a-book until I realised this wasn't Horowitz's narrative style, but Alan Conway's.)

Standing somewhere between homage, loving parody, and reinvention, Horowitz uses his crime fiction pedigree to great effect. Highly enjoyable. ( )