If you like a good, old-fashioned mystery à la Agatha Christie, then you will like Anthony Horowitz’s novels, Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders. The great thing about these novels is that each novel is two mystery stories in one book.

I read Magpie Murders back in 2017. It opens on book editor Susan Ryeland settling in to read a draft of Magpie Murders, book nine in bestselling author Alan Conway’s detective series featuring Atticus Pünd. The reader then actually gets to read the fictional Conway’s Magpie Murders, except for the last chapter. This takes the novel back to Susan, wondering why she was not provided with a complete draft manuscript to edit, when she finds out that Alan Conway is dead. Susan thinks the missing last chapter is related to Conway’s death, so if she can find the missing pages and solve the mystery of the novel within the novel, then she can figure out what happened to Conway.

Moonflower Murders was published last year, and I just finally got around to reading it. It is set two years after the events that occurred in Magpie Murders. Susan Ryeland is running a hotel with her boyfriend in Crete when an English couple approaches her and asks for her assistance with finding their missing daughter. Why would they ask Susan, a former book editor and now hotel operator, for help with finding a missing person? Because the daughter went missing after reading Alan Conway’s third book in his Atticus Pünd series called Atticus Pünd Takes the Case and she realized that someone she knows was wrongly imprisoned for murder. The English couple think that if Susan rereads Atticus Pünd Takes the Case she might discover what it was that their missing daughter discovered in novel and then figure out what happened to her. The reader gets to read another one of Alan Conway’s novels when about a third of a way through Moonflower Murders the page is turned to the cover of Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, with faux reviews, publishing information, the whole works. It is things like this that make reading unexpectedly fun.

The Atticus Pünd detective stories are quaint, English countryside mysteries where everyone is unfailingly polite and apologetic, and there is little violence or gory descriptions of crime scenes. The mysteries are quite clever, and I found it difficult to figure out whodunnit. The contemporary mysteries featuring Susan Ryeland are more violent and the people involved are more unpleasant (either people are just not as polite as they used to be, or we have a rose-coloured view of the past). The character of Susan follows the more current trend in mysteries where ordinary people decide to investigate murders even though they have no training or experience and seem to not care that they are putting themselves in danger.

I really enjoyed reading both Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders. Horowitz knows how to plot an intricate mystery and throw in enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing until the very end.