Magpie Murders #magpiemurders #anthonyhorowitz #harper #cozymystery @absltmom4x @absltmom

“You must know that feeling when it’s raining outside and the heating’s on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.”

and truly this was an most excellent book to read when the above quote is ever so true….although one could read it in any type of weather snow, hail, sleet, and especially the dead of might, and enjoy the ever so clever way in which Mr Horowitz wrote it. 

This is my second outing reading a book by this author and both times I have been blown away by his style, his concepts, and his ability to pull one into the story at an amazing rate. Susan Ryeland is an editor for a publishing house that has handled the extremely successful writings of Alan Conway and his main protagonist Atticus Pund. She well knows Conway, an author that has rubbed quite a few people in the wrong way so when nefarious things happen it is Ryeland who does the investigating thus becoming an amateur sleuth and taking us with her on her journey as she puzzles out the many nefarious characters that seemed to have reason to see Conway fail.

This book was a throw back, a kind of homage to those books of long ago, the ones many of us have enjoyed and devoured. Mr Horowitz has brought out in this tribute to the likes of Agatha Christie and others, a book that entices one to read and read. It is a book within a book and not knowing anything about this concept, I was blown away by how very brilliant a tactic this was. It was liked an onion being peeled away layer by layer and allowing the reader to acquire that sense of solving a whodunit along with Susan Reyland. It as atmospheric, set in Bath, and had that kind of wicked good fun we all enjoy in our mysteries.

It was definitely a fun book for those who love a mystery spread out before you with the pieces scattered but eventually brought together in a most astute way. So, calling all those who love mystery, who love canny, cagey, capable stories, this is the one for you! On to more Anthony Horowitz stories for me!

Anthony Horowitz, OBE is ranked alongside Enid Blyton and Mark A. Cooper as “The most original and best spy-kids authors of the century.” (New York Times). Anthony has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he is also the writer and creator of award winning detective series Foyle’s War, and more recently event drama Collision, among his other television works he has written episodes for Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. Anthony became patron to East Anglia Children’s Hospices in 2009.

On 19 January 2011, the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle announced that Horowitz was to be the writer of a new Sherlock Holmes novel, the first such effort to receive an official endorsement from them and to be entitled the House of Silk.