Moonflower Murders Too Long and complex, Yet Rewarding

 

 

 

THE MOONFLOWER MURDERS: MAGPIE MURDERS BOOK 2 (2020)

By Anthony Horowitz

Harper, 608 pages.

★★★★

 

You know you’re in for a complex mystery when the word murder appears in the plural. This one delivers in more ways than one, as it’s also a murder mystery novel that takes us inside another fictional murder mystery.

 

Susan Ryeland is living in Crete, where she runs a boutique hotel with her life/business partner Andreas Patakis. She’s there because she quit her publishing job after the death of Alan Conway, the author of Atticus Pund Takes a Case. He was an unpleasant part of her roster of clients and she wase happy to put that life behind her. If only the hotel wasn’t shedding money like autumn leaves.

 

As fate would have it, Lawrence Treherne offers her $10,000 to come to Sussex as his guest at Branlow Hall, an upscale hotel that puts hers to shame. She naturally wants to know how she, a former publisher, can possibly assist in finding his missing daughter Cicely. Treherne is convinced that the answer lies in Conway’s book, which his daughter was reading when she disappeared, and that Susan can decode it better than anyone. Her curiosity is piqued when she is told that Alan died in the same room in the Mayflower wing of the hotel in which Frank Parris was murdered. Although a Romanian staff member, Stefan Codrescu, was convicted that murder, Treherne thinks maybe Stefan is innocent, though he’s vague on why. It is curious, though, that Parris was killed the very day of Cecily’s in-house wedding.

 

To say that Susan knows her way around a case of souvlaki better than a murder case is an understatement. It doesn’t help that she knows Richard Locke, the detective who investigated Parris’s murder and Cecily’s disappearance, and the two despise each other. That’s pretty much the case with everyone she meets: Treherne’s wife; his older daughter Lisa, who runs the hotel and sees Susan as a sponge; Eloise, the nanny to Cecily’s daughter Roxanna; the Wilsons, who  retained possession of a house Parris wanted to sell; Alan’s ex-wife Melissa, whom he left when he came out as gay; Cicely’s husband Aiden MacNeil; and several others, including the spa and night managers. The plot thickens when Susan learns that Parris served as Alan’s introduction to gay life. Maybe Susan needs to re-read Alan’s novel, which she is loathe to do because she hated it the first time around.

 

The Moonflower Murders is multifaceted–even “The Marriage of Figaro” factors in–which is both a strength and a weakness. As Susan begins to take stock of motives, including who was sleeping with whom, she increasingly feels like she either needs to go back to Andreas or return to publishing–anything except be at Branlow Hall around so many awful people. Just about everyone is a suspect. The only thing she knows for certain is that no one is telling the unvarnished truth and for the life of her, she cannot see how two deaths eight years apart are related to a young mother’s disappearance. For all she can fathom, maybe Cicely is dead and everyone she met had a hand in it. Or perhaps Cicely decided to leave motherhood and her awful family behind and move somewhere like Crete!

 

In a book as multilayered as The Moonflower Murders, logic holes and improbabilities are perhaps inevitable. There are several such moments in the novel and I was not the first to think that several were

unconvincingly contrived. Plus, I always furl my brow when solving a puzzle rests upon obscure clues that require preternatural prescience to consider, let alone identify as key. Horowitz compensates for plot head-scratchers through strong character development. Trust me when I say you will meet numerous hard-to-digest people in this book. Trust me also when I say it’s hard to look away.

 

Rob Weir