Moonflower Murders (Susan Ryeland, #2) by Anthony Horowitz

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wonderfully intriguing and so very clever … again!

Following the incidents of Magpie Murders and Alan Conway’s death, Susan Ryeland relocated to the island of Crete with her beloved Andreas. They invested all their savings in buying a hotel and had become innkeepers, Andreas’s dream. But Susan was restless, dissatisfied with the direction of her new life. She and Andreas had become engaged, but she had put off taking the next step blaming the chaos and constant demands of running the hotel. She also missed her past career in publishing much more than she’d imagined she would. So, when Lawrence and Pauline Trehearne showed up at their hotel looking to hire her to find their missing daughter, Cicely, she fairly jumped at the opportunity to return to England.

The Trehearnes own and operate a hotel themselves: Farlingaye Halle, in Suffolk. Seven years previously, on the day of Cecily’s wedding on the grounds, one of their guests had been discovered murdered in his room, brutally bludgeoned to death with a hammer. The police identified the hotel handyman, a Romanian immigrant with a criminal history, as the perpetrator, and he was subsequently sent to prison for the crime. However, Cecily always and steadfastly believed that Stefan was an innocent man.

Weeks after the trial, author Alan Conway, Susan’s former client, visited the hotel, talking to staff and other witnesses about the crime. But when Alan had returned home from his research trip to Suffolk, he had confided to his partner, James, that he knew the police had got the wrong man. Still, he never shared what he’d discovered that caused him to make this claim with anyone, including the police. The result was his next bestselling mystery, Atticus Pund Takes the Case, based on the events of the murder and the people involved.

Now, years later, Cecily had finally read Conway’s book and something in it clicked, making her realize who the real killer was. She telephoned her parents, who were away on holiday, asking them to return home immediately so she could share her revelation with them before taking further action. But that was the last time they ever spoke with their daughter; the following day, Cecily disappeared while walking the dog, leaving behind her husband and small child. The Trehearnes turned to Susan because she had worked so closely with Alan Conway on the book, and they felt she might be able to figure out what Cecily saw in the book and find out where she had gone.

Moonflower Murders is the second book in Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland series and is again an intriguing book within a book with a murder to solve in each separate plotline. Susan is an intrepid investigator as she retraces Alan’s footsteps, steadily recreating the picture he must have seen seven years earlier. People are not happy to help her either. Without the authority of a police badge backing her up, she has a tough time as she questions those involved, and she ends up talking to a LOT of unpleasant people. On top of that, she’s trying to sort out her personal feelings about her relationship and future with Andreas as well as testing the waters of the current state of the publishing industry by contacting old colleagues from her working past should she decide to stay in England.

As in the previous book, the Atticus Pund mystery is embedded within the current investigation, so two for one. It is a clever mélange of elements similar to an Agatha Christie-style story. I also enjoyed the little hidden “Easter eggs” found throughout the Pund book, kindly pointed out for those of us that weren’t paying attention at the time.

Readers get a wonderfully-plotted mystery and a deep look inside our heroine’s heart and soul in this second adventure. I can tell you I was rooting for Susan Ryeland every step of the way. I recommend MOONFLOWER MURDERS for mystery readers who like a longer, more intricate story (it clocks in at over 600 pages or 15 discs or 18-plus hours of listening) with the look and feel of one of the classics from the Golden Age of Mysteries.

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