Magpie Murders

Anthony Horowitz is one of the UK's most prolific and successful writers. His novels The House of Silk and Moriarty were Sunday Times Top 10 bestsellers and sold in more than thirty-five countries around the world. His bestselling Alex Rider series for children has sold more than nineteen million copies worldwide. He is also the author of a James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis.

As a TV screenwriter he created both Midsomer Murders and the BAFTA-winning Foyle's War; other TV work includes Poirot, the widely-acclaimed mini-series Collision and Injustice and most recently, New Blood for the BBC. Anthony sits on the board of the Old Vic and regularly contributes to a wide variety of national newspapers and magazines. In January 2014 he was awarded an OBE for services to literature. Anthony Horowitz lives in London.

www.anthonyhorowitz.com

@AnthonyHorowitz

From the author of Moriarty and Trigger Mortis, this fiendishly brilliant, riveting thriller interweaves a classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie with an equally ingenious modern-day mystery that transforms the reader into the detective.
Alan Conway is a bestselling crime writer. His editor, Susan Ryeland, has worked with him for years, and she’s intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. Alan’s traditional formula pays homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. It’s proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job.
When Susan receives Alan’s latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder at Pye Hall, an English manor house, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects, and plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan
reads, the more she realizes that there’s another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ambition, jealousy, and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder.
Masterful, clever, and ruthlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage crime fiction.

“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