Anthony Horowitz's ingenious Marble Hall Murders begins with crime-solving book editor Susan Ryeland (featured in Horowitz's Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders) having just broken up with her boyfriend in Crete to return to London. Now freelancing, she receives a request to edit a continuation of late author Alan Conway's detective series featuring Atticus Pünd. Pünd's Last Case is being written by Eliot Crace, grandson of legendary children's book author Miriam Crace, who died 20 years earlier. Having nearly been killed twice in the past while editing Pünd novels, Susan wants nothing to do with the latest one.
But she does need money to pay for the new flat she just bought. So she reads the first chapters and immediately catches that Eliot, like Alan before him, is writing a fictionalized version of a real-life murder: his famous grandmother's. Curious, since all public reports indicate Miriam died of natural causes. Eliot has also seeded Pünd's Last Case with clues about who he claims killed his grandmother. Against her better judgment, Susan is once again drawn into a mystery that could end her life.
With this and his Daniel Hawthorne series, Horowitz is arguably the best metafictional crime author of his generation. He deftly crafts mysteries that function on dual levels, this time in Susan's 21st-century London life and Pünd's 1955 case in the South of France. Horowitz also pokes fun at himself; Susan says, "I have no love of continuation novels.... What exactly is the point?" though Horowitz has written such novels for the Sherlock Holmes and James Bond series. Clearly, Horowitz's point is to entertain, which he does with aplomb. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, reviewer and freelance editor at The Edit Ninja