The Scare Salon

And I have to say that I adored this book just as much as the first in the series; it’s structured similarly, but is a whole new story (well, stories, as it retains the same “book-within-a-book” format as its predecessor) with some crucial references to the events of the first novel. Although you don’t necessarily have to read Magpie Murders to get into Moonflower Murders and understand what’s going on, I would definitely recommend doing so, since there are several connective threads, and really, both books are so wildly entertaining that why wouldn’t you want to read them both?

Like Magpie, the first and last long sections of Moonflower Murders are told from the first-person point of view of book editor Susan Ryeland. After the horrific events at the end of the first novel, her life has gone in a different direction; she no longer works as an editor, and has moved from London to Crete to run a hotel with her boyfriend Andreas. She likes it, but she still feels as though something is missing in her life; she misses England and her former work, and she isn’t entirely certain that she wants to stay with Andreas, though she still loves him dearly.

Into this quagmire of dissatisfaction and ambiguity comes something of a blast from the past, for although Susan had thought that she was done with her cantankerous (and now very dead) prize author Alan Conway, it would appear that he is not entirely done with her, even if only in an indirect way.

To wit, Susan is approached in Crete by an English couple, Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, who own a fancy hotel in Sussex called Branlow Hall. Eight years ago, they tell her, a man named Frank Parris was savagely murdered in his room at the establishment, beaten to death with a hammer. His body was discovered right in the middle of the wedding of the Trehernes’ daughter Cecily, which was being held on the premises.

Thing about it is, that murder was apparently solved almost immediately: the culprit was ostensibly an employee at the hotel, a Romanian immigrant with a long criminal record named Stefan Codrescu. The victim’s blood was found in his room, as was money he supposedly stole from Frank; further, his fingerprints were on the doorknob of room 12, and the night desk clerk thought he saw Stefan creeping toward the spot where the crime occurred. And as if that wasn’t damning enough, Stefan actually confessed to the crime, and was summarily imprisoned. Open and shut, or so it seemed.

Cecily Treherne, however, never believed that Stefan was guilty, and she evidently found confirmation of this in a most unlikely place: among the pages of one of Alan Conway’s best-selling Atticus Pünd detective novels, specifically Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. Alan Conway, it should be noted, had stayed at Branlow Hall after the Frank Parris murder took place, and loosely based his novel Moonflower Murders on it, even using many of the real people involved as characters in the book, which most of them were not all that happy about since the portrayals were mostly very unflattering.

After she read the novel, Cecily phoned her parents (who were vacationing abroad) in a seeming panic, telling them she was now sure that Stefan had not killed Frank, and told them she was going to send them a copy of the book so they could see for themselves what she’d figured out, with the implication being that Alan Conway had also known who had killed Frank but had encoded the information in the book for some reason instead of telling the police what he knew. But not long after she made this phone call, Cecily completely disappeared.

The Trehernes suspect that Cecily knew too much about the Frank Parris case and went missing because of it, but the police are not being a great deal of help. Desperate for answers, the couple offers to pay Susan ten-thousand pounds if she will come to the hotel and read through the book to try and find out what it was that Cecily discovered in there. Obviously they can’t talk to Alan Conway himself because he’s dead, but they figure his editor Susan Ryeland is the next best thing, since she was more familiar with the man’s work than anyone.

Reluctantly, Susan agrees to this mission, mostly because she needs the money to fix up some things around her own hotel on Crete. She’s not sure how much help she’s going to be, since she’s not a detective and this isn’t really her bailiwick, but she’s willing to give it a shot.

Susan arrives at Branlow Hall and starts meeting the vast array of suspects, all of whom seemingly have something to hide. She spends quite a while gathering information about both the murder of Frank Parris and the disappearance of Cecily Treherne before deciding that the time has come to revisit Alan Conway’s novel Moonflower Murders, which she actually hasn’t read for several years.

At this point, just as in Magpie Murders, we delve into “Alan Conway’s” fictional mystery, which is somewhat inspired by the real murder of Frank Parris in the frame story but is also very, very different. The book within a book, which has its own title page, publication credits, and page numbering right in the middle of the main book, is set in 1953 and tells the story of a famous American actress named Melissa James, who bought a charming hotel called the Moonflower in Devon, but was strangled to death in her bedroom by an unknown assailant.

Just as in the main story, everyone surrounding the fictional murder is sketchy as fuck, and many of them had motive to bump off the victim. This story is also really fun in its own right; it’s different enough from the “real” murder to make it its own thing, but because you know there’s a clue (or clues) about the “real” murder buried in there somewhere, you end up reading it with eagle eyes to try to discover what information Cecily uncovered that might have gotten her killed.

Moonflower Murders was every bit as fun and satisfying as Magpie was, and I liked that you actually got to spend a great deal more time with main character Susan at the beginning of the book as she delved into her investigation, since the “fictional” Alan Conway book doesn’t start until past the halfway mark. Like the previous novel, the resolution of both mysteries is twisty and surprising, but makes total sense once revealed.

As I mentioned in my review of Magpie, please know going in that the book is essentially going to switch gears and go into a totally different (but somewhat related) story in the middle, so it might take a little while to get reoriented when the fictional mystery begins and also when you return to the frame story toward the end. But this wasn’t an issue for me because I was expecting it, though I did have to flip back a couple times to remember some details from the main story once I returned to it in the final third.

If you love both old-school and modern murder mysteries, this is a delighful two-for-one that I would highly recommend; it’s full of all the entertaining plot twists and red herrings you might want, and both the characters of Susan and the “fictional” detective Atticus Pünd are really appealing, well-delineated, and sympathetic as they struggle to solve their respective puzzles. It’s quite easy to see why this novel got so many rave reviews, as it’s a complete blast from front to back.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.