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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
The way this book is written is so impressive. There's a book within a book format, containing not one but two nicely-crafted whodunits that both have self-contained stories that also connect to one another. They were also both page-turners, despite having different settings, time periods, and main characters. As usual, I didn't figure out the solution to either mystery, but the clues were laid out in such a way that you could figure it out, and when it was all explained it made sense.
I also like how much Horowitz includes details about the publishing industry and working as an author - this isn't a self-insertion like the Hawthorne series, but you can tell that he puts a lot of his own experiences into the book. This was a great follow up to Magpie Murders and I hope he keeps writing these.
I also like how much Horowitz includes details about the publishing industry and working as an author - this isn't a self-insertion like the Hawthorne series, but you can tell that he puts a lot of his own experiences into the book. This was a great follow up to Magpie Murders and I hope he keeps writing these.
mysterious
slow-paced
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
there were parts of this I really enjoyed but all in all entirely too long and dragged out and there were weird reflective parts that contradicted themselves between the book and the book inside a book with susan’s comments about alan’s writing style
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I read Magpie Murders, the first book in this series, a few years ago and thought it was a readable pastiche of Christie et al which also featured a smugly self-satisfied authorial voice. This sequel fails to build on the strengths of the previous book, and has far more weaknesses.
Some of these are structural weaknesses. The pacing is poor. I get that writing in this genre requires some level of plot contrivance/coincidence, but there were just too many here, and too many things that Susan doesn't do/think/follow up on for me to be able to ignore.And “evidence” presented that doesn’t prove jack shit. One of the identifying things about the killer is that they claimed to have read a book when it’d previously been established that there’d been a nationwide issue with distributing this one specific bestselling book series for months, months! Impossible for them to have been able to procure a copy of the novel, ergo lying about having read it, ergo killer! Except like… sometimes book shops won’t shift copies of something for a while? Or, since this book is set in the 2020s, there are ebooks? There are libraries? Hell, we also explicitly get told that there are many charity shops in the local town which might well have copies of a book series that we are told repeatedly is a bestseller.
Just as in the first previous installment, this is about clues to a real life murder being embedded in a fictional text, and you get that entire “book” reproduced within this one, down to its front matter, at the centre of the book. We're told that someone read the novel, realised that the wrong person had been convicted for a murder that was committed almost a decade ago, and was killed for that knowledge. Our amateur detective, Susan, waits like a week to then sit and read Atticus Pund Takes the Case because.... well, if she read it like anyone else realistically would have, on the plane from Crete back to England, there would have been a whole other novel inserted after about Chapter Three and that would have been disconcerting for the reader. But we’ve got to wait, for Doyleist rather than Watsonian reasons, to get to this text which we are told is vital for solving the murder. And what we’re given as this embedded novella is just unbelievable as something that would have multiple people recognise themselves in, would worry about someone else recognising their hotel in, or would make the average person say “wait, there are embedded metafictional clues in this!”
This book is like 600 pages long. It’s such a long, long way to walk to get to the big reveal of whodunnit, when whodunnit is pretty obvious fairly on, for reasons to do both with the plot and with Anthony Horowitz’s characterisation tics.
And whoo boy, what issues there are with the characters. (This is even setting aside the fact that none of these characters are really people, they’re just 2D stock types. Flat. Which, okay, it’s a cosy murder mystery. They can be perfectly enjoyable when peopled only with the literary equivalent of paper dolls.) I'm going to bet a quid that Anthony Horowitz describes himself as a political "moderate" or a "commonsense centrist" or something like that, but that he's also at some point made dinner table comments about why these LGBTQ people insist on rubbing things in your face, he'd be fine with them if they weren't so obvious about it. There’s so much of an undercurrent here of “well you can’t say anything these days because of the PC brigade!” or “of course I’m not racist/homophobic, but!”
Yet again we’ve got men who sleep with other men (I’m using that phrasing deliberately here) framed as perverse, devious, manipulative, camp, and generally dead, their sexual identities and practices equated very firmly with their personal and moral flaws. We’ve got lies about how an off-stage dead queer character contracted HIV, because of course those people lie about their status. There are repeated clear microaggressions, or sometimes just aggressive aggressions, about the gay characters that are generally preceded by “I don’t care that he’s gay of course, but…” which never once are challenged, even in her inner monologue, by our “good person” main character.
The framing of a character who is fat and who has some kind of unspecified learning difficulty is cringey. The frequent linking of unfuckability with shrillness/hysteria in female characters (particularly one who has a facial scar) is telling. The only Black character—in fact I'm pretty sure the only non-white character in the book, when England in the 2020s is roughly 20% non-white—is also the only person whom the narrative ever explicitly tells us is racist (against Romanian people). Despite being the only person who actually has the authority to investigate a murder, as a police officer, he is a passive character hovering on the edge of the narrative. He’s incompetent and of him we are told: "That was his manner... always on the edge of violence. It was as if he had caught something, some sort of virus perhaps, from the criminals he investigated."
To be clear, this is not me saying that LGBTQ people can’t be flawed, or that non-white characters can only be depicted as angelic, or that people are always going to think in the “correct” ways about people with intellectual disabilities, but that Horowitz seems incapable of writing such characters in anything other than a certain set of very narrow ways, and unaware of the connotations of what he’s writing. I don’t think he sees such characters as human in the same way that he’s human—and given that crime/mystery fiction only really works when it’s grounded in specific, recognisable, and believable human behaviour and emotions, well, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise then that Horowitz doesn’t seem capable of delivering a good example of the genre.
Some of these are structural weaknesses. The pacing is poor. I get that writing in this genre requires some level of plot contrivance/coincidence, but there were just too many here, and too many things that Susan doesn't do/think/follow up on for me to be able to ignore.
Just as in the first previous installment, this is about clues to a real life murder being embedded in a fictional text, and you get that entire “book” reproduced within this one, down to its front matter, at the centre of the book. We're told that someone read the novel, realised that the wrong person had been convicted for a murder that was committed almost a decade ago, and was killed for that knowledge. Our amateur detective, Susan, waits like a week to then sit and read Atticus Pund Takes the Case because.... well, if she read it like anyone else realistically would have, on the plane from Crete back to England, there would have been a whole other novel inserted after about Chapter Three and that would have been disconcerting for the reader. But we’ve got to wait, for Doyleist rather than Watsonian reasons, to get to this text which we are told is vital for solving the murder. And what we’re given as this embedded novella is just unbelievable as something that would have multiple people recognise themselves in, would worry about someone else recognising their hotel in, or would make the average person say “wait, there are embedded metafictional clues in this!”
This book is like 600 pages long. It’s such a long, long way to walk to get to the big reveal of whodunnit, when whodunnit is pretty obvious fairly on, for reasons to do both with the plot and with Anthony Horowitz’s characterisation tics.
And whoo boy, what issues there are with the characters. (This is even setting aside the fact that none of these characters are really people, they’re just 2D stock types. Flat. Which, okay, it’s a cosy murder mystery. They can be perfectly enjoyable when peopled only with the literary equivalent of paper dolls.) I'm going to bet a quid that Anthony Horowitz describes himself as a political "moderate" or a "commonsense centrist" or something like that, but that he's also at some point made dinner table comments about why these LGBTQ people insist on rubbing things in your face, he'd be fine with them if they weren't so obvious about it. There’s so much of an undercurrent here of “well you can’t say anything these days because of the PC brigade!” or “of course I’m not racist/homophobic, but!”
The framing of a character who is fat and who has some kind of unspecified learning difficulty is cringey. The frequent linking of unfuckability with shrillness/hysteria in female characters (particularly one who has a facial scar) is telling. The only Black character—in fact I'm pretty sure the only non-white character in the book, when England in the 2020s is roughly 20% non-white—is also the only person whom the narrative ever explicitly tells us is racist (against Romanian people). Despite being the only person who actually has the authority to investigate a murder, as a police officer, he is a passive character hovering on the edge of the narrative. He’s incompetent and of him we are told: "That was his manner... always on the edge of violence. It was as if he had caught something, some sort of virus perhaps, from the criminals he investigated."
To be clear, this is not me saying that LGBTQ people can’t be flawed, or that non-white characters can only be depicted as angelic, or that people are always going to think in the “correct” ways about people with intellectual disabilities, but that Horowitz seems incapable of writing such characters in anything other than a certain set of very narrow ways, and unaware of the connotations of what he’s writing. I don’t think he sees such characters as human in the same way that he’s human—and given that crime/mystery fiction only really works when it’s grounded in specific, recognisable, and believable human behaviour and emotions, well, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise then that Horowitz doesn’t seem capable of delivering a good example of the genre.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia
Moderate: Racism
adventurous
challenging
tense
medium-paced