Susan Ryeland (Magpie Murders)

About the Susan Ryeland (Magpie Murders) series

The Susan Ryeland series is Anthony Horowitz's tribute to golden-age British detective fiction, built on a nesting-doll structure: each novel follows book editor Susan Ryeland investigating a real murder that eerily mirrors the plot of a manuscript she's editing -- a complete, fully-plotted whodunit-within-the-whodunit starring fictional 1950s detective Atticus Pund. Readers effectively get two mysteries per book, Susan's contemporary investigation and Pund's period one, with clues in the manuscript sometimes illuminating the real case Susan is chasing.

Magpie Murders (2016) introduced the format to wide acclaim and was adapted into a PBS/BritBox television series. Moonflower Murders (2020) found Susan running a small Greek hotel and pulled back into another Pund-shaped mystery, while Marble Hall Murders (2025) has her reluctantly agreeing to edit a third, unauthorized Atticus Pund continuation novel by a new author -- again finding real danger folded into its pages. Each entry works as a satisfying pure mystery on its own while building Susan's ongoing arc as a reluctant amateur detective increasingly entangled with her own authors' fiction.

Running since 2016 with three novels so far, Susan Ryeland stands alongside Hawthorne & Horowitz as one of the two major pillars of Anthony Horowitz's acclaimed adult crime-writing career, distinguished by its structural cleverness and deep affection for classic detective fiction.

How to read this series

Read the Susan Ryeland series in publication order (used here), starting with Magpie Murders (2016) -- each book contains its own complete Atticus Pund mystery within Susan's contemporary investigation, and while every entry is a self-contained case, Susan's own life and relationships develop across the series, so reading in order is recommended.

This entry covers all three published novels. It's an adult crime series, distinct from Horowitz's YA work (Alex Rider, The Power of Five) and from his other adult crime series, Hawthorne & Horowitz, both tracked separately in this catalogue.