Review: Moonflower Murders

Moonflower Murders Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Since reading Magpie Murders back in 2018, I have made it a point to read all new Anthony Horowitz books. His characters and his sense of humor make me smile; his plots have me asking questions from beginning to end.

But back to Moonflower Murders. It is a true sequel to Magpie Murders, and so Susan Ryeland is back, trying to figure out the secrets embedded in mystery writer's Alan Conway's detective Atticus Pund. I enjoyed this from the first page.

Like last time, Horowitz embeds an Alan Conway novel in the book, and like last time I was annoyed to switch characters, and like last time, I ended up enjoying the parallel novels and the way the Atticus Pund novel informs the larger story.

Horowitz has a self-deprecating sense of humor, such as when he writes about writers. He says, “It’s such a strange profession, really, living in a sort of twilight between the world they belong to and the world they create. On the one hand, they’re monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even . . . but it’s all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they’re genuinely altruistic.”

He observes, “I think it would be fair to say that a whodunnit is one of the very few forms of literature that rarely merit a second read.” No, I probably wouldn’t, and so I’ll keep watching Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders, also written by Horowitz. I’m not a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes books, but perhaps I’ll try the ones he wrote, just because he wrote them.


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