Review: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I love Anthony Horowitz’s work. I’ll get that out of the way at the outset. I’ve been reading and watching his work for years. He’s written Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and that’s on top of all the TV he’s written. Including creating and writing most of the episodes of what I consider to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, Foyle’s War.

Having said all that, when I read Horowitz’s novel Magpie Murders in 2017, I thought it was his greatest work. Because it is a greta murder mystery, which kept me guessing and has twists and turns. Structurally speaking the book is genius level plotting as we’re dealing with the murder of an author and the manuscript of his final book, which is missing the last chapter and the identity of the murderer. The writer’s longtime editor tries to sift through the man’s life and uncover who he was and what happened, and in the process manages to capture a lot about how writers write and think and – like magpies – pull names and details and stories from the people and places we encounter and turn them into something else. It captures some of what it means to be caught in the wake of all that and see parts of yourself in fiction. The book manages to convey why it is so many of us love mystery fiction. And also, why so many people hate it.

To be a good mystery and to simultaneously take apart the genre, its writers and its readers is not an easy task. And it is stunning to behold, even on rereading when I’m prepared for what’s coming I’m still impressed with what Hororwitz is able to do.

So this is all prologue to say that when I heard Horowitz had written a sequel to Magpie Murders, I was hesitant. Because I don’t think that books need sequels. And I think almost every crime and mystery series has gone on too long and been diminished in the end by repetition and volume.

I am happy to say that Moonflower Murders is a great mystery novel.

I almost feel like I’m damning it with faint praise. Because I think I enjoyed the book more than I’ve enjoyed almost any book over the past year. I think it’s funny and inventive. It’s smart. And it can be hard to make a good crime novel without people acting dumb or doing stupid a lot of things.

The problem of course is that the first book was genius, I think, and not simply a great mystery novel but so much more than that. By comparison saying that the sequel is a very good mystery novel feels almost insulting, or a bit of a let down.

But in the heart of the novel is also something that I think every writer and maybe a lot of readers see as possible. And that’s the obsessive eye for details. To craft these small shoutouts and references and place them throughout the text, maliciously or otherwise. To spend time obsessively looking for them, because like anything, once you know that they exist, you can’t help but look for them. Again, one of those things that makes a good mystery writer and a good mystery reader. An eye for detail, a look for clues, reading into things. And like anything, when taken to an extreme, it’s bad for one’s health.

Whether there will be another Susan Ryeland book, I don’t know, but Moonflower Murders is another great Anthony Horowitz novel.