I rarely read sequels back-to-back — I find that doing so diminishes the charm of the first book for me and I prefer revisiting a story after a period of time. But Magpie Murders was such delightful reading that I couldn’t resist jumping into Moonflower Murders right away.
The structure of this book is similar to that of Magpie Murders, i.e., the book consists of two complete stories which are separate yet linked, with one story embedded in the other. However, unlike Magpie, the main story here is neatly cleaved into two and bookends the embedded one. This also makes the book a bit more difficult to follow given that there are several characters in each of them and there seems to be some correlation between the two sets.
Like in the earlier book, the Atticus Pünd story titled “Atticus Pünd Takes The Case” is a pacy one — detective Pünd has been called to investigate the murder of a famous actress at Tawleigh-on-the-water, and the cast of suspects include her husband, household help, hotel staff, people that live in the village as well as some outsiders. In the main story, the parents of a missing woman hire Susan Ryeland to find their daughter — she has gone missing after spotting a clue while reading APTTC that could solve a previous murder and Susan had edited and published the book.
Horowitz, as in his earlier book, devotes a lot of attention to both the stories and neatly fits all the pieces of the puzzle by the end. Having said that, I did enjoy this book slightly lesser than its precursor. Perhaps, it was the back-to-back reading that reduced my enjoyment or perhaps it was the fact that Horowitz appears to try too hard to be clever to live up to the expectations of this book. Either way, I would definitely recommend a reading of this book, but not immediately after the previous one!
Pros: Two interesting mysteries in one cleverly combined
Cons: A tad too clever perhaps, too many characters
