Another carefully plotted and engaging mystery from Anthony Horowitz. Our patrons are going to be very excited for this one. Personally, I found the book within a book format overcomplicated this time around, so I didn't like it as much as Magpie Murders. I prefer the plot with Susan and her colleagues to the inner plot with Atticus Pund. I feel like this would be a great book for readers who enjoy the classic mysteries--in fact, I plan on passing it on to my son, who is currently really into John Dickson Carr.

This book contains a mystery within a mystery as did the Magpie Murders and it is equally as good a read. Horowitz is definitely a go-to when I want a good British murder mystery. But, I have to agree with another reviewer who wrote "The only jarring piece to this book is the stereotypical depiction of homosexual lifestyles which left me wishing the author had avoided using the trope of older men preying on younger men." But, this is an interesting read and fans of mystery will enjoy the book.

Horowitz delivers another ingenious murder mystery within a mystery that is every bit as captivating as Magpie Murders. It was good to see Susan back as the erstwhile “detective” charged with unraveling the disappearance of a young woman which is also tied to an 8 year old murder. The key to the mystery is contained within an Atticus Pund novel and Susan must figure out the identity of the murderer before more people die.

The only jarring piece to this book is the stereotypical depiction of homosexual lifestyles which left me wishing the author had avoided using the trope of older men preying on younger men. Besides that, this was a great read and will be popular with fans of mystery and suspense.

This was such a fun read. It is similar to 'Magpie Murders', with the same structure of a book-within-a-book and the character Susan Ryeland acting as an amateur detective.

There are two separate, complex mysteries in the book. The first is the disappearance of a young woman, Cecily, whose parents have hired Susan to try to find out what happened to her. Cecily's parents own a boutique hotel, and eight years ago a guest, Frank Parris, was murdered at the hotel and an employee was found guilty and jailed for the crime. Alan Conway, the famous crime novelist, visited the hotel after Parris's death and wrote 'Atticus Pund Takes the Case', which may or may not be based on the murder.

After reading Conway's book, Cecily tells her parents she knows who the real killer was, then promptly disappears. Susan, trying to find out what happened to Cecily, then reads the book to try to find clues about the killer's true identity and find out what happened to Cecily. This is the second mystery, as the entire Pund novel, with its own murder to solve, is within the first book, and we get to read it along with Susan.

As I said, this book was a lot of fun. Horowitz gives his readers a lot of credit, and his books are intricate and complex. There are a lot of fun twists, clues, and anagrams to discover. I would highly recommend this to anyone who loves a classic mystery.

When looking to dive into a fantastic British mystery, Anthony Horowitz is a go-to author. And this new one did not disappoint. Once again, this mystery actually contains an entire book within the book. So there are two mysteries to solve. The framing story revolves around the editor of Alan Conway's mysteries who gets dragged into her second murder mystery. And within that story we read an entire Atticus Punt mystery, set in the 1950s. The storylines are separate, but related and it's fun to have even more mysteries to keep track of. Horowitz does this with ease. I will say that I solved one of the mysteries on my own. I'm still not sure if that makes me proud or disappointed. Both, I guess. But this was such a fun read and I will be recommending this to all mystery readers.

I didn't realize until I started reading that this was the second in a series, but it wasn't too much of a problem having missed the first one. This one involves a hotel where a murder was committed 8 years earlier. An author later visited the hotel and then wrote a murder novel about the events. In the present, the woman who runs the hotel reads the novel and discovers something she believes relates to the original murder, but then she disappears. The author has since died and cannot tell anyone what she might have discovered. OBVIOUSLY, the thing to do is for the parents of this woman to find the publisher of the book and pay her to investigate into the disappearance and original murder. Because that is exactly what you would do, right? Hire a publisher to solve an already-solved murder and a missing persons case. I almost gave up on this one because it was ludicrous, but eventually I did get more interested and enjoyed it in the end. I don't know if I would go back and read the first in this series, but I might give it a shot. 3.5 stars, rounded to 4.

The second in the Susan Ryeland series does not disappoint. Like the first in the series, Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders is a mystery within a mystery book. Absolutely loved it!

Anthony Horowitz writes amazing books that really make you have to think. His writing style reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes stories and sometimes those can be hard to follow for me. However, I love the storylines so much that I force myself to find time where I can think hard to understand what is going on. Moonflower murders was the second in the series and went along with what I remember from the first book. I didn't realize there would be a sequel since he started a different series in between, but I am glad he returned to these characters. Susan was very likable in the first book and I enjoyed the continuation of her storyline weaved into a new mystery. It took me awhile to get through this book because I felt I needed to devote my undivided attention to it, but it was a great read.

Thoroughly enjoyed this second offering of the Susan Ryeland series, with another Atticus mystery tucked inside.

Ingenious! This book makes you pay attention to every word.
The characters are complex. Moonflower Murders was a story within a story, within a story.
Anthony Horowitz is an incredible storyteller who gets under your skin and plants his characters inside your head.

This is a wonderful follow-up to The Magpie Murders. Literary agent Susan Ryeland is back and in top sleuthing form. I love this series for many reasons - the peek behind the curtain at he publishing world, the story-within-a-story framework, and most of all, the cracking good whodunnits. Moonflower Murders delivers on every level. A must-read for mystery fans.

Anthony Horowitz is an autobuy author for me. My favorite books of his are Magpie Murders, The Sentence is Death, and the Word is Murder. I was eventually able to enjoy this one, but I think it missed the mark a little bit, and the large page count was unnecessary. As with Magpie Murders, there is a book within a book. Susan Ryeland, editor to late author Alan Conway, is recruited by a family following the disappearance of their daughter, who had been investigating an 8-year-old mystery. She claimed to have found a clue inside Conway's novel, Atticus Pund Take the Case, and so her parents ask Susan to find out what happened to her. This was a stretch to my imagination, as it seems they would hire an investigator with actual experience, but Susan knew Alan, so they figure she can read between the lines. Susan is a frustrating character for me, and I found it annoying that she took so long before she bothered procuring a copy of the book to read. At about the 38% mark, we get the pleasure of reading the Atticus Pund book. I enjoyed that more than the rest of the book, probably because it focuses completely on a mystery, and not on Susan's personal life. I think the book would have been much stronger without Susan's unrelated drama. The mystery and the book within a book would have been enough for a strong book, and it would not have off to such a slow start. Still, Susan does figure out whodunnit, and there were things I definitely did not see coming. I am still looking forward to reading whatever Horowitz writes next!

This is every bit as delicious a reading experience as Magpie Murders (2018). I really wasn’t sure how Horowitz was going to manage a second book, as several of the main characters in the first one are dead or heading that way at the end of the novel. But Anthony Horowitz is one of the smartest writers working right now, and this sequel to his (in my opinion) classic Magpie Murders is every bit as good as the first one.

The main character is editor Susan Ryeland, who has given up her successful career to head to Crete and help her partner run a small hotel there. It’s not going well. The hotel is having trouble and it’s a mountain of work, so when Pauline and Lawrence Treherne appear asking for Susan’s help in locating their missing daughter back in England, she readily agrees, especially when they sweeten the pot by offering her £10,000. She’s tired of Crete, she needs the money, and she takes the offer.

Why they offer Susan money is trickier – to explain, at any rate. Susan had been the editor of the hugely successful author, Alan Conway, whose creation, Atticus Pünd, sounds very much like Hercule Poirot. He’s intelligent and sees things others do not, and he always solves the crime. The Atticus Pünd books are set in the 50’s, but Susan and the late Alan Conway exist in the present. The Trehernes think Susan can find their daughter because, as Alan’s editor, she was most familiar with his work, and shortly before she disappeared, their daughter insisted that one of the Pünd books showed her the answer to a murder that took place in the hotel the Trehernes run, on their daughter’s wedding day, eight years ago.

Susan checks into beautiful Branlow Hall and begins to familiarize herself with the death of Frank Parrish, who was brutally killed with a hammer in room 12 almost a decade earlier. No one is pleased to see her except for the missing woman’s panicked husband, but none of the people she talks to can see how the case of Frank Parrish can be solved by reading a crime novel. True, the novel is also set in a hotel, one Alan Conway visited, and features a murder, but the similarities seem to end there. Or do they?

While Horowitz brilliantly sets up the mystery that Susan is investigating in the present, she finally must return to the book she edited all those years ago to see if she can discover what clue the missing woman found that seems to prove the accused killer is innocent. So, in the middle of what is actually a quite compelling story, Horowitz inserts the entire book - Atticus Pünd takes the Case – and dares the reader to solve the case along with Susan.

This is clever and could be heavy handed but it turns out that the novel within the novel is every bit as interesting as the central one, and I was quickly drawn into the second story. Sometimes it’s jarring when an author attempts something like this, but I was as easily transported by Atticus Pünd’s story as I was by Susan’s. Horowitz has kept the framework of the hotel for his second book but changed many of the details, while still including cruel and thinly veiled portrayals of the people Susan is investigating.

This novel within a novel is placed in the middle of the book, and the tone – before and after – changes as far as Susan is concerned. In the first part she’s unsettled and confused, in the second, her mind is clear and she becomes focused and sure. She does manage to solve both cases – that of the missing woman, and that of the eight year old murder. The clues are fiendishly clever and while I saw they were there as enumerated by Susan in her classical drawing room summing up with all suspects present, I didn’t see them as I inhaled each of the stories.

Throughout this updated version of a golden age novel there are clever nods to detective fiction, a genre Horowitz obviously loves and reveres. He has added to its luster with his contributions, both Susan Ryeland stories being, to me, instant classics. You’ll want to re-read this one.

**Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for providing me with an e-ARC of this book to review.

Susan Ryeland is now a retired editor, following the death of the author who wrote the famous Atticus Pund detective series. She runs a hotel in Greece with Andreas, her boyfriend. When Susan meets the Treherne family, she soon finds herself embroiled in another mystery. Susan travels to stay in the family-owned hotel to try to offer some insight into their daughter’s disappearance, which may be related to something she discovered in an Atticus Pund novel based on an old murder that occurred at the hotel.

As in The Magpie Murders, this book features a novel within a novel called, “Atticus Pund Takes the Case”. This storyline was engrossing and filled with little clues to discover along the way. I really enjoyed this section of the book, as the first section of Susan’s POV was a little slow and tedious for me at parts. (At a little over 600 pages, this is a hefty book!) The last section of Susan’s story concludes the book, as Susan solves the mystery. The plot is clever and full of twists and turns—I am glad that I was not the one investigating, because that mystery would be left unsolved!

If you enjoy a good, old-fashioned mystery, this may be the book for you! I look forward to this series continuing and can’t wait to see where Anthony Horowitz will take Susan (and Atticus) next!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

I've read a few of Anthony Horowitz's novels, and I liked MOONFLOWER MURDERS the best. There were a lot of moving parts, tons of suspects, and while I guessed some parts of the conclusion, I definitely did not guess it all. It was good fun to read.

We pick up with Susan Ryeland, the erstwhile editor and publisher from MAGPIE MURDERS, in Crete, where she is running a hotel with her partner, Andreas. Ryeland fled England after nearly being killed by her old boss after she played detective and discovered he had murdered their firm's most successful author, Alan Conway. Missing parts of her old life, Ryeland jumps at the chance to head back to England to investigate another mystery - this one is a missing-person case possibly connected to an 8-year old murder. And what is the connection? A book written by Alan Conway, of course.

I have to say, I really like the book-within-a-book motif that Horowitz has employed with this series, and I think it worked even better in the second novel. I put on my amateur gumshoe hat and picked apart the Alan Conway story with a fine-tooth comb. I was sure I could solve the case...and I sort of did. But there were definitely enough surprises to keep it fun and interesting.

I think the thing that bothers me about this book, and maybe the series, is that I'm not sure I like Susan Ryeland. She seems cold and distant. She uses people and then discards them. It takes her until the end of the novel to realize that while she's been complaining about not receiving her $10,000 stipend, a man has been sitting in prison for a crime he may not have committed. And don't get me started on her guardian angel - that was too much.

Overall, the mystery parts of MOONFLOWER are quite intelligent. I enjoyed the whodoneits. But I could have done without Ryeland as the detective. Four stars for a diverting and challenging mystery. If Horowitz writes another, I'll probably read it.

I had received this book as an ark from NetGalley and the publisher originally but I struggled to get into the book at the time. Months later after the book came out I was able to listen to the audiobook which I enjoyed. The narrators Lesley Manville and Allan Corduner were lovely.

Moonflower Murders is a book within a book. Characters coming back from Magpie Murders are Susan Ryeland-current Greek hotelier and former Alan Conway editor; deceased author Alan Conway and his detective Atticus Pund. Susan is asked to come back to England to help solve a missing persons case at a country hotel. Alan had stayed at that hotel eight years ago after a murder occurred and he used that murder and most of the locals as the basis of Atticus Pund Takes the Case.

Lots going to keep track of but a well done mystery...well technically two well done mysteries in one book.

Loved this third mystery in the series! Horowitz never disappoints. It’s so fun to have him in the actual story. I’ve read all of his adult fiction and I’ve never been disappointed. Love the James Bond novels as well!

This was not a love at first chapter novel... took me until about 50% in to actually want to get back to it.

Atticus Pund, Atticus Pund, Atticus Pund... oh, how I love you! I really enjoy the his stories and would love a series dedicated exclusively to his crime solving. I found his story much more engaging and the characters much more developed that in the actual novel.

That being said... is this novel worth wadding through 300 pages to get to the good part? Yup! Atticus Pund is well worth it. 4 stars.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC of Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz.

HOROWITZ slides RIGHT into home with this one, again, because he's brilliant. Holy cow, I thought Magpie Murders would be tough to top, but here you go.

This is what blew me away more than anything. The book is an eighteen hour listen, much longer than the average mystery novel. There are a bazillion characters because each character in the book also have a parallel character in a novel written about them. Does that sound confusing? You would think so, and I don't think a lot of people could pull it off without giving their readers a case of brain fever. But he does, so well, and the characters are so knowable and sympathetic by the end. It's an amazing and intricate mystery that took no time to sink my hooks into.

Frequent readers know that mystery stories are a personal favorite and that I have written very positively about the whodunits crafted by Anthony Horowitz; see for example The Word is Murder and The Sentence is Death. I particularly liked his 2017 Magpie Murders and was therefore looking forward to his latest "story within a story" featuring the publishing editor Susan Reyland: MOONFLOWER MURDERS. Sadly, it was not as obviously clever as earlier works. I once again enjoyed the embedded mystery novel by Alan Conway (titled Atticus Pund Takes the Case and edited by Reyland) which is featured and would honestly have been happy with that 1950s story as a stand-alone. Maybe it is just having a harder time concentrating during this COVID era, but the portion of MOONFLOWER MURDERS that deals with the real-life disappearance of the innkeepers' adult daughter, Cecily, just seemed to drag a bit and I think re-reading would help me to spot more clues. There certainly was plenty of description including several pages which were included to explain how the fictional detective novel related to Reyland's disappearance investigation. Numerous suspects exist in both case and the endings were surprising, as evidenced by the starred review which MOONFLOWER MURDERS received from Publishers Weekly. If you love mysteries, try any of these suspenseful titles.