Marble Hall Murders (Susan Ryeland Series, 3)
This third entry in the Susan Ryeland mystery series is a joy to read. Cleverly framed as a “book within a book,” the dual storylines in this narrative converge and parallel each other in significant ways.
In the contemporary storyline, freelance editor Ryeland is assigned to work on a tenth entry in the popular historical Atticus Pünd detective series. The new book is being written by Eliot Crace, who is brought in after the murder of Alan Conway, the series creator. Through her editing of Eliot’s work, Ryeland becomes aware of Eliot’s family history. She is introduced to the entire Crace family, who are mainly living on the estate of its late matriarch, Miriam Crace, whose death twenty years earlier now appears suspicious.
In 1955, after meeting famed English detective Atticus Pünd in a doctor’s office, Lady Margaret Chalfont sends him an urgent message imploring him to come to her estate in the south of France, where she is living with her second husband, and her children and grandchildren. On the day before Pünd’s arrival, Lady Chalfont mysteriously dies after drinking a cup of tea. While Crace illuminates the events surrounding Lady Chalfont’s death, he also places clues, in the form of anagrams and other word puzzles, in the text which shed light on the identity of Miriam Crace’s killer.
This is a beautifully drawn story with fully fleshed-out characters, arresting settings, and plenty of intrigue. Horowitz’s prose and plotting are propulsive and easy to follow. The abundance of suspects in both storylines will leave readers guessing until the book’s final pages. While this is the third entry in the Ryeland series, there is sufficient backstory supplied so that this book can easily be read as a standalone.
