I don’t know when I read my first Agatha Christie novel, but I remember it was life changing! I remember being thrilled that there were so many books to read and making a list so I could read them all. We can never replace Christie, but Magpie Murders comes pretty close to hitting all the notes that made Christie’s novels so satisfying and famous. It is set in a small English town, a famous author is murdered and there are only a hand full of suspects, but what makes Magpie Murders extra special is that it is a murder story within a murder story and they are interrelated and with many different layers of clues that must be followed to find out what happened.

Susan Ryeland is a editor for a mid-size publishing company in London. She has been the editor for Alan Conway and his Atticus Pünd detective series for quite awhile and they have just received his most recent manuscript. Taking it home over the weekend, she settles in to read this next installment of Conway’s very profitable series.  Like all of Conway’s books this one is also set in a small village in the English countryside in the early 1950’s. Pünd, whose German background makes him something of an outsider in England, is always being called on to assist the police in their inquiries and is soon caught up in the mysterious death of a local landowner, Sir Magnus Pye, whose decapitated body is found at Pye Hall.  Susan is soon engrossed in the story, trying to keep track of the various suspects, but when she gets to the end of her copy of the manuscript the last pages are missing and Pünd has yet to solve the mystery. Frustrated by not getting a resolution to the mystery and fearing that there must have been some kind of copying error, Susan phones her boss and leaves a voice message letting him know what has happened. Later that evening, on her way to meet friends for dinner, she hears on the taxi radio that Alan Conway has tragically died.

On Monday morning when Susan meets with her boss she finds that her boss’ copy is also missing the final pages of the book, so Susan decides to visit Conway’s home and try and find  the missing pages so that they can publish his final novel. But once she gets to there she realizes that the are some uncanny similarities to the novel and Conway’s own life and she begins to uncover some unsettling facts about the days leading up to Conway’s death.

This was such a fun book! Horowitz gives us Conway’s novel so we get the wonderful Christie-esque flavor for most of the beginning of the book and then we have Susan Ryeland, the reluctant detective, trying to find the missing pages of the novel and uncovering something more sinister in the latter half of the book and it is the wonderful juxtaposition between “fiction” and “reality. ” Horowitz has created a loving but modern homage to queens of the classic British detective novel, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and it is as satisfying and delightful as high tea, with scones and clotted cream!

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Marian, Lauren, Sharon and Keith

Book Study Worthy? Yes

Read in ebook format.