Marble Hall Murders
Anthony Horowitz
Penguin Audio
Published April 10, 2025
17 hrs 39 mins
🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️
This is the third and probably/hopefully last book in the Susan Ryeland trilogy about a middle-aged literary editor whose authors keep getting murdered. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all three, and normally would hope for a great series to keep going, but the Unique Selling Point of these is the Book within a Book format of a 1950s Agatha Christie type mystery where the solution of one provides clues to the contemporary murder. It’s unlikely enough that Susan would find herself caught up in three criminal investigations, any more would be ridiculous. No, better to leave this as a fantastic trilogy and move on to something new.
Susan thought she was done with Atticus Pünd, the dogged German detective who is the hero of a bestselling series, when the author, Alan Conway, was murdered in the first book – Magpie Murders. However, needing work after returning to London from Crete after things with Andreas didn’t work out, she is reluctantly persuaded to take on Problem Child author Elliot Crace, who has been commissioned to write a new Pünd novel. She soon discovers that just like Conway, Elliot is inserting people and events from his own life into the book – and then he starts hinting that it contains the answer to the death of his own grandmother – a famous author herself, twenty years earlier…
As with the previous books, I listened to the audiobook, brilliantly narrated by Lesley Manville & Tim McMullan, who play the main characters in the TV adaptations too. I watched the first one, so was delighted to discover that Moonflower Murders is already out and this one is also being adapted. This is 16 hours long but the time flew by as I soon became immersed in the story. There are a lot of characters to keep track of but it was never confusing, there is misdirection aplenty but the plot all made sense in the end. I didn’t guess whodunnit for either mystery, and really liked how both Susan and Atticus’ stories ended. Highly recommended.
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