Magpie Murders: the Sunday Times bestseller crime thriller with a fiendish twist - Hardcover

Horowitz, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1409158365 ISBN 13: 9781409158363

Publisher: Orion, 2016

Synopsis

Magpie Murders

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of June 2017: When editor Susan Ryeland begins to read the latest manuscript by curmudgeonly, bestselling author Alan Conway, she has no idea that by the time she gets to the end, the author will be dead from a mysterious fall, and that the last chapter of his last novel will be MIA. Sounds simple enough, but Horowitz uses this set-up to construct a clever novel-within-a-novel framework. One novel is set in 1950s Saxby-on-Avon, the English village where Conway’s Poirot-like fictional detective Atticus Pund arrives to investigate a murder, the other in modern-day London where Susan’s reading of the manuscript leads her to suspect that Conway’s death may not have been accidental. Two novels for the price of one means double the fun for readers: two mysteries, two detectives, and possibly two murderers. Paying homage to the vintage British manor house mysteries, Magpie Murders is a masterfully dark, twisty thriller with only one down side: reading it will make you wish there really was a series of Atticus Pund thrillers. --Vannessa Cronin, The Amazon Book Review

From the Back Cover

From the author of Moriarty and Trigger Mortis, this fiendishly brilliant, riveting thriller interweaves a classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie with an equally ingenious modern-day mystery that transforms the reader into the detective.

Alan Conway is a bestselling crime writer. His editor, Susan Ryeland, has worked with him for years, and she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. Alan’s traditional formula pays homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. It has proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behaviour if she wants to keep her job.

When Susan receives Alan’s latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder at Pye Hall, an English manor house, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects and plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan reads, the more she realises that there’s another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ambition, jealousy and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder.

Deviously dark, clever and ruthlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a masterful dark take on vintage crime fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1409158365
• ISBN 13: 9781409158363
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448