'Magpie Murders' by Anthony Horowitz
- Reed
- May 26
- 2 min read
Author: Anthony Horowitz
Rating: A
Vibe: Agatha Christie fanfiction meets snarky publishing drama—two mysteries for the price of one, and both delightfully twisty.
Quick Take: An entertaining, puzzle-box murder mystery that plays with genre, structure, and your expectations—in the most satisfying ways.
You start reading a charming 1950s-style murder mystery—and then the author dies. In real life. In the book. Sort of. Magpie Murders is a gleeful tangle of plots, puzzles, and perfectly timed mischief.
Anthony Horowitz isn’t just writing a mystery here—he’s writing two. One is a pitch-perfect homage to a 1950s British whodunnit starring a Poirot-style detective. The other unfolds in modern-day London, where our editor-turned-sleuth Susan Ryeland is trying to solve the real-life murder of the novel’s author. Both are clever. Both are deadly. And both are connected in ways that are ridiculously fun to untangle.
Susan is an absolute joy to follow—smart, skeptical, grounded, and just jaded enough to keep things from getting too earnest. Her voice is exactly what you want in a book like this: sharp but never smug, and always a few steps ahead of where you think she’s going.
The murdered author, Alan Conway, is gay—and awful. I loved that. He’s not a saint, not a stereotype, not a sad story. He’s just a difficult man who wrote bestselling mysteries and made enemies in the process. His queerness isn’t the focus, but it’s there—matter-of-fact and baked into the world. His partner is one of the prime suspects, but it’s not because he’s “the gay lover.” It’s because, like everyone else in this book, he had a motive.
What really sold me, though, was the structure. This isn’t just a book-within-a-book—it’s a magic trick in literary form. The fictional mystery doesn’t just echo the real one; it refracts it, teases it, even critiques it. By the time the threads start pulling together, you’re not reading to find out whodunnit—you’re reading to see how the hell Horowitz pulls it off. And he does. With flair.
I've read all of Horowitz’s mysteries (and loved them), but Magpie Murders is still my favorite. It’s like watching a master clockmaker disassemble and reassemble a grandfather clock while cracking jokes and hiding clues in the gears. There’s no pretension here, just craftsmanship and glee. This is the kind of book that reminds you why mysteries are fun in the first place.
