Rating: 3/5
Review:
Good in parts
I’m rather ambivalent about Moonflower Murders. Anthony Horowitz
is an excellent writer and parts of this book are very enjoyable, but
overall I found it a bit of a slog.
This is the
follow-up to The Magpie Murders and again features Susan Ryeland, now
an ex-publisher and living in Crete, who again is called on to solve
a murder using clues from an Atticus Pund novel, this one which
published by her eight years before. A man has been convicted of a
horrible killing at a swanky country-house hotel, but a woman who has
since disappeared has left a message saying that one of Alan Conway’s
books contains the clues to the real murderer.
It’s a classic
golden-age set-up which is done very well, and I found the
introductory section featuring and narrated by Susan very good.
However, the central section of the book is the whole of the Pund
mystery, which I found rather dull and hard going. As a pastiche it
didn’t grab me in the way some real golden age mysteries do. The
final section is Susan’s solution of the mystery which picks up
again, but even allowing for the genre is a little over-contrived.
It is also somewhat prone to self-congratulation as Horowitz, in the
guise of showing how clever Alan Conway’s writing has been, tells
us rather insistently how clever he has been. There’s no need for
him to do this because he’s so obviously a very skilled and
imaginative writer and I found it just a little cringe-inducing.
To be honest, I
ended up skimming a good deal of the book-within-a-book. The rest
was fun but overall I didn’t enjoy this as much as some of
Horowitz’s other work.
(My thanks to Random
House, Century for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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