Magpie Murders: A Novel
"Magpie Murders is a double puzzle for puzzle fans, who don't often get the classicism they want from contemporary thrillers." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times
New York Times bestseller Winner of the Macavity Award for Best Novel NPR best book of the Year Washington Post best book of the Year Esquire best book of the Year
From the New York Times bestselling author of Moriarty, this fiendishly brilliant, riveting thriller weaves a classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie into a chilling, ingeniously original modern-day mystery.
When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the bestselling crime writer for years, she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan's traditional formula has proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job.
Conway's latest tale has Atticus Pünd investigating a murder at Pye Hall, a local manor house. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but the more Susan reads, the more she's convinced that there is another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript: one of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition, and murder.
Masterful, clever, and relentlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage English crime fiction in which the reader becomes the detective.
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Community Reviews
If one quote could sum up my feelings about this book, it would be the one above. I understand the premise of the book within the book, parallels slowly being revealed through the unraveling of two mysteries. I however, do not understand the hype this book received.
Magpie Murders could have existed solely as the mystery Atticus Pünd is on a mission to solve, without the Alan Conway nonsense mixed in.
This almost made it to my DNF pile....
I also really liked all the characters, both the ones in the "novel" and the ones in this book. The former all had a hint of the charm of old-school mysteries and all were interesting in their own right, while the latter were all people who felt developed and people I would want to know more about. Of course, I was most interested in the murdered author, especially since we basically only find out about him through other people's memories of him, but I loved that he was just a grumpy asshole who made no apologies for anything and hated his successful book series, because he's not your typical sympathetic murder victim at all, which made it more interesting.
(Also the Atticus Pund book series sounds super interesting and I would love to have them be a real series because I would totally read them based on the one that's in this book!)
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