Another mystery, but this time a modern one! However, it's a modern one masquerading as a post-WWII one, all wrapped up in an enigma, you know how it goes.
The framing device for this book is that Susan, a book editor in modern London, has received the manuscript for the ninth and final book in the Atticus Pund mystery series, which is set in a small English village in the 1950s and has all of the trappings you would expect from this. The first two hundred pages of the book are that novel, until suddenly it stops at the end of the penultimate chapter on the cliffhanger of who's responsible for the murders. Susan doesn't have the final chapter, and neither does the CEO of the publishing house. The author, Alan Conway, must have it, except he died by suicide over the weekend...or did he?
This is a book in which we get two mysteries for the price of one, a classic whodunit in the style of Christie, and a contemporary meta mystery in which a book editor must assume the role of the detective, to varying degrees of success. It leaves you with one heck of a cliffhanger midway through the book and forces you to both abandon the pretense of the mystery you first started to read as being 'real' and then introduces a new one, which parallels and echoes the first one in interesting ways. It's not easy to keep a reader invested in both of the mysteries at once, but the author definitely pulls it off. I'm very glad I read this particular book after spending a month or two reading a number of the classic mysteries so I had a better grounding in the tropes this books swims around in. Horowitz has written a number of other books (as well as Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War and Poirot, this is a man who knows what genre he wants to write) and I'm afraid my TBR pile is about to get unexpectedly bigger once again.
Grade: A
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