Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz offers a murder mystery within a murder mystery as fictional writer Alan Conway uses his final book in the Atticus Pünd detective series to make a mockery of his work and his readers. The reader is challenged to solve the mystery in the Pünd novel as well as Conway’s strange suicide and the disappearance of the last chapters of his novel. Even though the Pünd novels had made Conway rich, he had never liked writing them and was demeaning toward the people who enjoyed the books that he considered trash. Conway was killed and the last chapter of his final novel disappeared in one man’s attempt to save the public from the spiteful announcement Conway planned to make about the secret behind the name Atticus Pünd. Themes in the novel include the inherent evil of man, the process of solving a crime, and the phenomena of art mimicking real life.
