JUNE 2017 - AudioFile
Listen straight through—or savor slowly? That will be your struggle because Horowitz’s delicious mystery-within-a-mystery is, as they say, “fiendishly clever” and terrifically narrated. Samantha Bond begins enticingly with her husky vibrato and fully realized performance as a contemporary book editor who’s been given a murder-mystery manuscript. Soon, we’re in the midst of that book, set in 1955 and performed by Allan Corduner with a delightful bow toward the storytellers of old. A village busybody has fallen and broken her neck, and when her boss is murdered (a suit of armor is involved), famous detective Atticus Pund arrives to assist the police. When the manuscript ends abruptly, our editor determines to follow the clues, a potentially lethal decision. Oh boy, oh boy. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 02/06/2017
Bestseller Horowitz (The House of Silk) provides a treat for fans of golden age mysteries with this tour de force that both honors and pokes fun at the genre. In the prologue, an unnamed editor sets the tone by describing how reading the manuscript of Magpie Murders, the ninth novel in a bestselling mystery series by Alan Conway, cost her her job and many friendships. In the text of the manuscript itself (which is accompanied by a bio of Conway and blurbs from real-life authors Ian Rankin and Robert Harris), Poirot-like sleuth Atticus Pünd, a German concentration camp survivor who has settled in England, tackles an Agatha Christie–like puzzle in 1955 Saxby-on-Avon. The verdict of accidental death seems warranted in the case of housekeeper and unrepentant busybody Mary Blakiston, who took a fatal fall down a flight of stairs at Pye Hall, since no one else was in the locked manor house at the time. But rumors that her estranged son wished Mary dead lead his fiancée to seek Pünd's help. The identity of the person responsible for Mary's death is but one of the questions Pünd must answer, and Horowitz throws in several wicked twists as the narrative builds to a highly satisfying explanation of the prologue. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (June)
From the Publisher
Each of the narratives in Magpie Murders is engaging and fluid, each with its own charm, though Horowitz’s joyful act of Christie ventriloquism is, in particular, spectacularly impressive.” — Washington Post
“Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders is catnip for classic mystery lovers… With its elegant yet playful plotting, Magpie Murders is the thinking mystery fan’s ideal summer thriller.” — Time Magazine
“An ingenious funhouse mirror of a novel sets a vintage ‘cozy’ mystery inside a modern frame.” — Wall Street Journal
“Brilliant. Really, really brilliant. I loved it.” — Sophie Hannah, author of The Monogram Murders
“An extravagant circus of a novel, part high-wire act, part funhouse mirror. Intricate, bold, stone-cold clever— both comfortably old-fashioned and thrillingly new.” — A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window
“Doubly Devilish.” — People
“Horowitz..has devised an ingenious whodunit within a whodunit, a metamystery with Agatha Christie roots.” — O, the Oprah Magazine
“A treat for fans of golden age mysteries…. [A] tour de force …. Horowitz throws in several wicked twists…. Highly satisfying.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Magpie Murders is an ingenious, twisting tribute to the sleepy English countryside murder and will thoroughly entertain readers of old fashioned detective thrillers.” — New York Journal of Books
“Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie…will welcome this wildly inventive homage…as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A perfect summer read from the author of Moriarty.” — AARP Magazine
“Magpie Murders [is] a fiendishly clever literary puzzle.” — Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“There’s much to enjoy in Anthony Horowitz’s spry, sardonic Magpie Murders.” — Guardian
“An ingenious novel-within-a-novel . . . part crime novel, part pastiche, this magnificent piece of crime fiction plays with the genre while also taking it seriously.” — Sunday Times
“Superbly written, with great suspects, a perfect period feel, and a cracking reveal at the end.” — The Spectator
“Anthony Horowitz has devised a fiendish mystery within a mystery that will have you hooked from page one. We loved this Agatha Christie-esque crime novel.” — Good Housekeeping (UK)
“A stylish, multi-layered thriller—playful, ingenious and wonderfully entertaining.” — Sunday Mirror
“A compendium of dark delights. . . . A brilliant pastiche of the English village mystery and a hugely enjoyable tale of avarice and skullduggery in the world of publishing.” — Irish Times
“This can only be described as incredibly clever—but what else would you expect from Horowitz?” — The Herald (Glasgow)
“Magpie Murders is a double puzzle for puzzle fans, who don’t often get the classicism they want from contemporary thrillers.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times
TIME Magazine
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders is catnip for classic mystery lovers… With its elegant yet playful plotting, Magpie Murders is the thinking mystery fan’s ideal summer thriller.
Good Housekeeping (UK)
Anthony Horowitz has devised a fiendish mystery within a mystery that will have you hooked from page one. We loved this Agatha Christie-esque crime novel.
Wall Street Journal
An ingenious funhouse mirror of a novel sets a vintage ‘cozy’ mystery inside a modern frame.
Washington Post
Each of the narratives in Magpie Murders is engaging and fluid, each with its own charm, though Horowitz’s joyful act of Christie ventriloquism is, in particular, spectacularly impressive.
New York Journal of Books
Magpie Murders is an ingenious, twisting tribute to the sleepy English countryside murder and will thoroughly entertain readers of old fashioned detective thrillers.
People
Doubly Devilish.
Irish Times
A compendium of dark delights. . . . A brilliant pastiche of the English village mystery and a hugely enjoyable tale of avarice and skullduggery in the world of publishing.
Sunday Times
An ingenious novel-within-a-novel . . . part crime novel, part pastiche, this magnificent piece of crime fiction plays with the genre while also taking it seriously.
Janet Maslin
Magpie Murders is a double puzzle for puzzle fans, who don’t often get the classicism they want from contemporary thrillers.”
Sophie Hannah
Brilliant. Really, really brilliant. I loved it.
The Spectator
Superbly written, with great suspects, a perfect period feel, and a cracking reveal at the end.
the Oprah Magazine O
Horowitz..has devised an ingenious whodunit within a whodunit, a metamystery with Agatha Christie roots.
Guardian
There’s much to enjoy in Anthony Horowitz’s spry, sardonic Magpie Murders.
A.J. Finn
An extravagant circus of a novel, part high-wire act, part funhouse mirror. Intricate, bold, stone-cold clever— both comfortably old-fashioned and thrillingly new.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Magpie Murders [is] a fiendishly clever literary puzzle.
The Herald (Glasgow)
This can only be described as incredibly clever—but what else would you expect from Horowitz?
Sunday Mirror
A stylish, multi-layered thriller—playful, ingenious and wonderfully entertaining.
AARP Magazine
A perfect summer read from the author of Moriarty.
The Guardian
There’s much to enjoy in Anthony Horowitz’s spry, sardonic Magpie Murders.
Seattle Times
Great fun . . . [for] readers who can’t get enough of James Bond at his coolest and suave-est.
Bookish
…fiendishly clever new thriller…In true Conan Doyle tradition, all the clues are skillfully hidden in plain sight, but readers will sail right past them until a shocking twist forces them to replay the entire sequence of events in their heads, begrudgingly admiring the author for his audacity.
NPR
[In The House of Silk,] Watson’s elegiac voice should silence the objections of even the most persnickety Sherlock scholar.
The Spectator (UK)
The Atticus Pund story is superbly written, with great suspects, a perfect period feel and a cracking reveal at the end.
New York Times Book Review
The heart of any good thriller is the plot, and…Horowitz doesn’t disappoint. The action moves with high velocity…. Also stays true to the Bond of Fleming’s books.
Huffington Post
A book firmly rooted in the style of Doyle, faithful to the character as created and with just enough wiggle room to allow the author to say all the things he’s been longing to say about the world of 221B Baker Street...THE HOUSE OF SILK will satisfy.
Toronto Sun; 24 Hours
It’s the same flickering and compulsive feeling as being pulled into The Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz’s unputdownable puzzle whodunit.
Glenn Perrett
Cleverly written with a fun plot and interesting characters, Magpie Murders is a good murder mystery.
Simon Schama
Horowitz has written a humdinger of a Bond story, so cunningly crafted and thrillingly paced that 007’s creator would have been happy to have owned it. . . . From his brilliant first chapter on, Horowitz is a pitch-perfect mimic of the Fleming one-line punch.
Washington Post
Each of the narratives in Magpie Murders is engaging and fluid, each with its own charm, though Horowitz’s joyful act of Christie ventriloquism is, in particular, spectacularly impressive.
Wall Street Journal
An ingenious funhouse mirror of a novel sets a vintage ‘cozy’ mystery inside a modern frame.
null Toronto Sun; 24 Hours
It’s the same flickering and compulsive feeling as being pulled into The Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz’s unputdownable puzzle whodunit.
Time Magazine
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders is catnip for classic mystery lovers… With its elegant yet playful plotting, Magpie Murders is the thinking mystery fan’s ideal summer thriller.
Washington Post
Each of the narratives in Magpie Murders is engaging and fluid, each with its own charm, though Horowitz’s joyful act of Christie ventriloquism is, in particular, spectacularly impressive.
The Spectator
Superbly written, with great suspects, a perfect period feel, and a cracking reveal at the end.
Irish Times
A compendium of dark delights. . . . A brilliant pastiche of the English village mystery and a hugely enjoyable tale of avarice and skullduggery in the world of publishing.
AARP Magazine
A perfect summer read from the author of Moriarty.
People
Doubly Devilish.
Good Housekeeping (UK)
Anthony Horowitz has devised a fiendish mystery within a mystery that will have you hooked from page one. We loved this Agatha Christie-esque crime novel.
Sunday Times
An ingenious novel-within-a-novel . . . part crime novel, part pastiche, this magnificent piece of crime fiction plays with the genre while also taking it seriously.
Wall Street Journal
An ingenious funhouse mirror of a novel sets a vintage ‘cozy’ mystery inside a modern frame.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Magpie Murders [is] a fiendishly clever literary puzzle.
the Oprah Magazine O
Horowitz..has devised an ingenious whodunit within a whodunit, a metamystery with Agatha Christie roots.
Guardian
There’s much to enjoy in Anthony Horowitz’s spry, sardonic Magpie Murders.
Sunday Mirror
A stylish, multi-layered thriller—playful, ingenious and wonderfully entertaining.
The Herald (Glasgow)
This can only be described as incredibly clever—but what else would you expect from Horowitz?
Time Magazine
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders is catnip for classic mystery lovers… With its elegant yet playful plotting, Magpie Murders is the thinking mystery fan’s ideal summer thriller.
Library Journal
★ 04/01/2017
Horowitz's fourth adult novel (after Trigger Mortis) presents two mysteries for the price of one, crafting a classic whodunit within a modern mystery. Susan Ryeland is an editor for a small press whose success rests on the old-fashioned mystery novels of Alan Conway. Returning from escorting an author on a book tour, she finds Alan's latest Atticus Pünd manuscript, Magpie Murders, on her desk. Upon reaching the novel's end, she finds that the last chapter is missing. When she informs her boss, Charles Clover, he tells her that Alan has committed suicide. Susan searches for the lost chapter, and in the process comes to believe that Alan's death was no suicide. Using clues buried in the manuscript, she investigates his death. While Susan and the fictional Atticus are very different characters, they use similar techniques to tease out the clues and hints to bring each mystery to resolution. VERDICT Both stories might stand alone, but combined, they result in a delightful puzzle. Fans of Agatha Christie and the BBC's Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War (both written by Horowitz) will relish this double mystery. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12/16; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/17.]—Terry Lucas, Shelter Island P.L., NY
JUNE 2017 - AudioFile
Listen straight through—or savor slowly? That will be your struggle because Horowitz’s delicious mystery-within-a-mystery is, as they say, “fiendishly clever” and terrifically narrated. Samantha Bond begins enticingly with her husky vibrato and fully realized performance as a contemporary book editor who’s been given a murder-mystery manuscript. Soon, we’re in the midst of that book, set in 1955 and performed by Allan Corduner with a delightful bow toward the storytellers of old. A village busybody has fallen and broken her neck, and when her boss is murdered (a suit of armor is involved), famous detective Atticus Pund arrives to assist the police. When the manuscript ends abruptly, our editor determines to follow the clues, a potentially lethal decision. Oh boy, oh boy. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-03-07
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that's both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway's ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who's been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she'd been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary's son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy's boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus' twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she's still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway's own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway's entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional. Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who's evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.
