Moonflower Murders is the sequel to Anthony Horowitz’s clever mystery-within-a-mystery Magpie Murders. Like its predecessor, it is really two books in one. The first is set in the present day and features book editor Susan Ryeland. The second is a classic mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, set in the 1950s and featuring detective Atticus Pünd, the creation of the fictional, deceased author Alan Conway, whose murder Susan solved in Magpie Murders. As with the previous book, the fictional mystery set in the past provides clues to the “real” mystery set in the present.
As Moonflower Murders begins, Susan has left the publishing business and moved to Crete, where she and her Greek boyfriend Andreas run a hotel. The hotel has not been a success. Susan and Andreas are short-staffed and must do much of the work themselves. They are so busy they don’t have enough time for each other, so their relationship suffers. Susan misses working with books, which she loved to do when she lived in London and worked as an editor.
Then a wealthy couple, Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, arrive at Susan’s hotel and offer her a large sum of money to find their missing daughter Cecily. Eight years previously, an advertising executive, Frank Parris, was murdered at Branlow Hall, the hotel the Trehernes run in Suffolk, on the day of Cecily’s wedding. Stefan Codrescu, a Romanian maintenance man at the hotel, was arrested and convicted of the murder, after having confessed. A few months later, Alan Conway, who knew the victim, went to the hotel and wrote a disguised version of the events in his novel Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. Shortly before her disappearance, Cecily had read this book and figured out that Stefan is innocent, and someone else is the murderer. She called her parents to tell them, and then was never heard from again. Because Susan edited the book, Cecily’s parents think she knows more about it than anyone alive.
Susan leaps at the chance to return to England. She misses it, and the publishing business, and she wants time to rethink her relationship with Andreas. But the publishing business doesn’t welcome her back with open arms. No one besides Susan knows the true story of the events of Alan Conway’s death, and there are still too many questions about her role in what happened. Her investigation also does not go well. The only person who is at all helpful is Aiden, Cecily’s husband, but even he reaches a point where he doesn’t want to answer too many questions. No one at the hotel seems to have a motive for the murder eight years ago. (Susan, of course, thinks the same person is responsible for both the earlier murder and Cecily’s disappearance, because she figured out who it was.) The earlier victim, Frank Parris, had just been passing through on the way to visit his sister and brother-in-law.
The only people with a motive to kill Frank are his sister and brother-in-law, because Frank owned a half-share in their house and wanted to sell it after his business failed. The couple lie to Susan about where they were on the day of the murder and Frank’s sister is especially nasty to her and looks at her with absolute hatred before she leaves the house. But they don’t seem to have been on the scene at the time Frank was murdered.
Cecily’s icy sister, Lisa, tells Susan to stop asking questions and gives her only a day and a half before she must leave. She and Cecily have been rivals from a very early age, and Lisa has a scar on her face that she got when Cecily threw a knife at her. Lisa claims it was an accident, and Cecily didn’t mean to hit her. With very little time, and with her questions unanswered, Susan rereads the novel that contains the key to the murder, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case.
At this point, Horowitz inserts the entire Atticus Pünd novel into the book, so the action changes to the 1950s. The protagonist of this part of the story, Atticus Pünd, is a half-Greek, half-German Holocaust survivor who came to England shortly after World War II and works as a private detective. He is obviously inspired by Hercule Poirot, and he is much more intelligent than everyone else and always solves the cases he takes on. This story is set in a seaside village in Devonshire, with a hotel called the Moonflower. (The hotel in the present-day story, Branlow Hall, contains a Moonflower Wing, so the fictional hotel is obviously based on the “real” one.)
The owner of the Moonflower Hotel is a famous Hollywood actress, Melissa James. She hasn’t acted for a long time, but she has a chance to make a film with Alfred Hitchcock and restart her career. Melissa is married to a British aristocrat, Francis Pendleton, who doesn’t seem to have any identity apart from his wife. Everything in their house is hers, not his. Their marriage is deteriorating, and she appears to be having an affair with her handsome young financial advisor, who is involved in shady business deals, using her money.
Melissa accused the couple who manage the Moonflower Hotel, who are obviously based on the Trehernes in the present day, of stealing money from the hotel. Someone had been stealing from the present-day hotel, too, so that is another parallel. Not long after she confronts them, Melissa is found strangled to death in her house. As always in classic mysteries, there are plenty of suspects, including her husband, her financial advisor and possible lover, the couple at the hotel, the village doctor, who had seen her not long before the murder, and several others.
Atticus Pünd receives a call from Melissa’s lawyer, asking him to investigate, and he decides to take the case. He works with Detective Chief Inspector Hare, the local police detective, who is about to retire. Some of the people in the village are more helpful to him than others, but he eventually figures out who murdered Melissa. The story takes a surprising turn, though, when one of the prime suspects is also murdered. In the end, of course, Atticus gathers all the suspects together and presents his solution.
Then the novel moves back to the original story, in the present day. At first Susan can’t figure out the clue that Cecily found in Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. Apart from the hotel setting and similar names for some of the characters, the two mysteries seem to be completely different. As she takes a closer look, though, and asks more questions of the people who seemed so unhelpful before, she figures it out.
Moonflower Murders is a wonderful novel, just as clever and suspenseful as the previous book. Both stories, Susan’s and Atticus’s, held my attention, and both were hard to figure out. Horowitz, who is an acclaimed screenwriter as well as a novelist, adapted both this novel and Magpie Murders for television. Moonflower Murders will be shown on PBS beginning September 15. I enjoyed the adaptation of Magpie Murders very much. One of my favorite features of the adaptation, though, is not part of the books: the scenes between Susan and Atticus. In the books, the two stories are told separately. The closest thing to one of these scenes in Moonflower Murders is the scene at the end where Susan gathers the suspects and feels Atticus’s presence in the room, inspiring her. But there is no dialogue between the two protagonists, as there is in the TV adaptation. Of course, this is something that’s easier to do on TV. These are excellent books. At nearly 600 pages, Moonflower Murders might seem intimidating at first, but it moves along quickly. I couldn’t put it down, no matter which of the two stories I was reading.
Moonflower Murders is available from the Shapiro Undergraduate Library.