502. Moonflower Murders
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
608 pages, published November 10, 2020
Reading Format: Book
Summary
In Moonflower Murders, best selling author and creator of Foyle’s War and Midsomer Murders Anthony Hororwitz picks up where his mystery Magpie Murders left off. As with Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders cleverly features a book within a book. The protagonist of the modern day mystery is Susan Ryeland, a book editor who returns to the United Kingdom after several years decompressing in Greece. She comes home to solve a mysterious disappearance that is connected to a mystery novel she previously edited. That novel features the famous literary detective Atticus Pund and is included in the book in its entirety.
Quotes
“Everything in life has a pattern and a coincidence is simply the moment when the pattern becomes briefly visible.”
“What makes them dangerous is their belief that they should not be stopped, that they are justified in what they do. I will not speak of my experiences in the war, but I will say this. The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.”
“On the one hand, they’re monstrous egotists. Self-confidence, self-examination, self-hatred even … but it’s all about self. All those hours on their own! And yet at the same time, they’re genuinely altruistic. All they want to do is please other people. I’ve often thought it must demand a sort of deficiency to be a writer.”
“Pünd had never seen murder as a game, not even as a puzzle to be solved. His work was an examination of humanity at its darkest and most desperate. You could not solve crime unless you understood its genesis.”
“There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can’t be all bad.”
“I do not know what has brought you here or how you have been driven to an action as extreme as the one you are now contemplating,’ he said. ‘You must be very unhappy. Of that I am sure. Will you believe me if I say that no matter how bad things may appear, they will be better tomorrow if you allow tomorrow to do its work? That is the way of things, Miss Mitchell, and I am the living proof of it.”
“Atticus Pünd had no time for religion. During the war, he had been persecuted not for what he believed but for what he was, a Greek Jew whose great-grandfather had emigrated to Germany sixty years before he was born, unaware that although he was bettering his own life, his decision would lead to the extinction of almost his entire bloodline.”
“We had managed to drift into that awful arena, so familiar to the long-term married couple, where what was left unspoken was actually more damaging than what was said. We weren’t married, by the way. Andreas had proposed to me, doing the whole diamond-ring-down-on-one-knee thing, but we had both been too busy to follow through, and anyway, my Greek wasn’t good enough yet to understand the service.”
“It wasn’t that she would judge me. It was more that I would feel myself being judged.”
My Take
I read Magpie Murders during the second year of my reading quest and loved it. I followed that with several more books by the incredibly talented writer Anthony Horowitz, but have not liked any of them nearly as much as Moonflower Murders, the sequel to Magpie Murders. Horowitz knows how to spin a complex, incredibly clever trail that keeps you turning the pages long after bedtime. I highly recommend (but read Magpie Murders first).
