2020
Moonflower Murders
MM
An editor reads her star author's final whodunit manuscript — and discovers the last chapter is missing, the author is dead, and the book itself may hold the clue to a real murder.
Susan Ryeland, an editor at a small London publisher, sits down with the manuscript of Magpie Murders — the ninth and final novel featuring Atticus Pünd, the beloved 1950s detective created by her difficult star author, Alan Conway. The Pünd book is a classic village mystery: a housekeeper dead at the foot of the stairs, a hated aristocrat decapitated, a fog of secrets over the fictional hamlet of Saxby-on-Avon.
Then Susan reaches the end of the manuscript and finds the final chapters are missing. Worse: Alan Conway has just died in a fall from his tower, leaving what looks like a suicide note. As Susan hunts for the lost ending, she starts to suspect Conway hid real grievances — and a real crime — inside his fiction, and that his death was no suicide.
Horowitz pulls off a genuine high-wire act: the book-within-the-book is a satisfying whodunit in its own right, written in flawless Christie pastiche, while the frame story doubles as a wry, insider's satire of publishing. The two puzzles mirror and unlock each other, and both play fair with the reader.
Yes — it's one of the cleverest crime novels of the past decade, and the best modern homage to the Golden Age that actually works as a mystery rather than a gimmick.
The structure is the star, and it's also the main gripe: you read an almost complete 200-plus-page novel before the frame story properly kicks in, and some readers find the gear change jarring — or prefer one half so much that the other drags. The modern-day sections are lighter on atmosphere than the Pünd pastiche, and at over 500 pages the whole thing asks for commitment. But both solutions are fair, the anagram-and-wordplay clueing is a delight, and the payoff justifies the length.
Yes. Magpie Murders became a six-part series in 2022 from PBS Masterpiece and BritBox, adapted by Horowitz himself, with Lesley Manville as Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan as Atticus Pünd. It cleverly intercuts the two timelines rather than presenting them in sequence, and it was well received enough that Moonflower Murders followed as a second season in 2024. The show is excellent, but the book's structure — reading the manuscript whole, then hunting through it — is a different and arguably richer experience.
Yes. Moonflower Murders reuses the same setup — Susan Ryeland, a hidden mystery inside an Atticus Pünd manuscript — and openly spoils the solution and aftermath of Magpie Murders. Read Magpie Murders (2016), then Moonflower Murders (2020), then Marble Hall Murders (2025).
Effectively, yes. Roughly the first half is Alan Conway's complete-except-the-ending 1950s whodunit starring Atticus Pünd, presented as Susan reads it. The second half is the present-day investigation into Conway's death, which circles back to finish the manuscript's mystery too. Both puzzles get full, fair solutions.
Not directly. The Susan Ryeland trilogy stands alone. Horowitz's Hawthorne series (starting with The Word Is Murder) and his Alex Rider young-adult thrillers are separate, though fans will spot his trademark wordplay and metafictional games across all of them.
The biggest change is structure: the 2022 series intercuts the 1950s Pünd story with Susan's present-day investigation from the start, and even lets Susan 'converse' with the fictional Pünd. The book gives you the manuscript in one unbroken block first. A few subplots and character details are streamlined, but Horowitz wrote the adaptation himself and the solutions are intact.
A small, excellent email