Horowitz (the real-life author of both stories) does a great job introducing possible quandaries all fiction authors and readers go through, but then never explores them. I also thought there were a lot of deeper-level questions that the book could have explored in Ryeland half of the story but didn’t.

But I found the structure to be a turnoff why do I want to read 200+ pages and learn about characters and motives and clues when I’m going to have to do the whole thing again within the same book? I think both stories are fun to read - I truly cared who the murderer was in both the Pünd story and Ryeland story. I probably missed more than a few Easter eggs and callbacks that fans of the genre will understand. I’ve read several by Agatha Christie, but overall murder mysteries are largely unfamiliar to me. Confused yet?įrom reading reviews and comments online, I got the feeling Magpie Murders pays homage to previous murder mystery novels. Additionally, both the Pünd mystery and the Ryeland mystery have a cast of characters who could be the murderer in their respective reality. So page 25 could refer to page 25 of the Pünd mystery, roughly page 30 of the physical book I turned the pages of, or page 25 of the Ryeland mystery, roughly page 240 of the physical book. First, the page numbers run separately for the Pünd mystery and the Ryeland mystery. I found the structure of Magpie Murders to be original (novel, if you will), but somewhat frustrating. Both the Pünd story and the Ryeland story have a murder. The rest of the book switches several times between the present-day world of Susan Ryeland and the book-within-a-book about Atticus Pünd. The next 200+ pages are a murder mystery set in 1950s England.

There’s an “about the author”, beaming reviews, etc. The following pages follow just like a normal book does.

is then a title page of a book called “Magpie Murders: An Atticus Pünd Mystery”, a fictional book-within-a-book by a fictional author, Alan Conway.

The book begins in the first person, with a London-based editor named Susan Ryeland telling the reader that you (the reader) are about to read a book that changed her (Susan’s) life.

Magpie murders books in order