You might remember when I previously wrote about two other novels by Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders and The Word is Murder. Well I'm back at it again with Moonflower Murders!
Similarly to his other two books, Moonflower Murders is really a book about mystery books. It's a direct sequel to Magpie Murders in that it still follows the publisher Susan Ryeland as she attempts to solve another murder mystery that has jumped from the page of a book and into her life. And that's really my main complaint about this book, that it's so similar to its predecessor.
There's a lot about both books to love. But in many ways, Moonflower Murders is just a rehash of the things he did in Magpie Murders that played with established murder mystery tropes. There's a book within a book that gets included in its entirety. The protagonist often comments on how similar her real life is to a murder mystery, especially at the end with the gathering of all the suspects and going through her logic. She also comments on the choices made within the book within a book, how cliche some aspects are. The thing is, when I read Magpie Murders this all took me completely by surprise. Now it's a little old hat.
I would have expected Horowitz to go a little further with how he subverts tropes here. He tends to simply identify the tropes, make a statement about how this feels like a film, and move on with it. Maybe commenting on how many conclusions the detective draws weren't based on evidence that the reader has access to, making it seem like it was a stroke of genius. Or deliberately avoiding tropes altogether and commenting on that!
Don't get me wrong, I had a great time reading this book. And catching up on the characters was quite fun as well. It just left me wanting a little more. I hope that in whatever Horowitz tackles next, he pushes those boundaries more instead of rehashing what he's already done.
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