In Moonflower Murders, readers will soon learn that Anthony Horowitz does indeed have a devious mind. This book is all about solving puzzles, and there are lots of them. If you wonder why the book weighs in at 608 pages, it's because you get two books for the price of one. Like Susan Ryeland, you have to read the Alan Conway mystery that Susan edited, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, in order to figure out what's going on and who did what.

I did get tired of Susan procrastinating about reading the book, but I think Susan procrastinated in order to have readers become hopelessly tangled in the story. This is a marvelously twisted bit of plotting. The only problem I had with it is that I think I overdosed on puzzle-solving-- there are just too many. But it is fun, so if you're in the mood to decipher an ingenious tale full of twists, turns, and red herrings, Moonflower Murders may be just the book for you.

(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)

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Wonderfully intriguing and so very clever ... AGAIN!

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 melange 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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Having read both Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, I'd give them each only 3 stars. While some folks might like having '2 murders to solve in 1 book' I found it distracting, the writing boring, the murders not that interesting. They lacked zing anywhere. If you want to read a good murder mystery with 3 subplots, try 'Instruments of the Night' by Thomas H. Cook. A. Horowitz seemed to me to just like hearing himself, there was no reason for these to be so long otherwise.

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Well in my opinion Anthony Horowitz writes better than Alan Conway (yes, I know...) Part of the fun reading the Atticus Pund book was trying to relate characters and events to the other murder outlined by Susan; but there's very little correlation between the two and I grew disinterested while reading the Pund opus. Of course everything is explained in the end, but some of it seems a bit of a stretch. Still, a fun, but long, read.

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