Book info

• Title Moonflower Murders
• Author Anthony Horowitz
• Year 2020
• Genre Mystery

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend. But life isn't as idyllic as it should be: exhausted by the responsibility of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, Susan is beginning to miss her literary life in London - even though her publishing career once entangled her in a lethal literary murder plot. So when an English couple come to visit with tales of a murder that took place in a hotel the same day their daughter Cecily was married there, Susan can't help but find herself fascinated. And when they tell her that Cecily has gone missing a few short hours after reading Atticus Pund Takes The Case, a crime novel Susan edited some years previously, Susan knows she must return to London to find out what has happened. The clues to the murder and to Cecily's disappearance must lie within the pages of this novel. But to save Cecily, Susan must place her own life in mortal danger...​

Thoughts

I watched the TV adaptation of this relatively recently, and so it was fresh in my mind the story - Susan starting out in Greece, coming back to London to investigate the cold case of a murder in a hotel alongside the disappearance of a young woman. It’s more of what made the first book great - story within a story, meta references, great characterisation, and ultimately two good murder mysteries, one inside the other. I love Anthony Horowitz’s writing when he gets super detailed and twisty meta like this, so this was another success for me.

Rating: 4 / 5