I have been known to be something of an impatient reader. In the first half of this decade, I read 713 books — an average of 2.74 a week — all while maintaining the physique of a Greek god, fighting crime at night dressed as a badger, holding down a full time job as a lawyer for the downtrodden, and winning the last six series of Mastermind in a raft of ingenious disguises.

The need to read almost three books a week comes, in part, from maintaining this blog, on which I’ve set myself the aim of, for the majority of the year, posting three times a week — and, since my day-to-day life is of no interest to my readers, those posts will have to be about classics mysteries and related ephemera. But, equally, I only set myself the target of three posts a week because I’ve typically always been an eager reader, burning through books with an avidity that borders on hunger, an avidity that only increased intensity once I stumbled upon the world of these classic mysteries and saw new vistas open up in front of me.

So, when Anthony Horowitz’s third Susan Ryeland novel Marble Hall Murders (2025) arrived the other week, clocking in at nearly 600 pages, part of me honestly worried if I’d get it read quickly enough to maintain the necessary churn and so meet my blogging targets. And, y’know what? I didn’t. It took me about four days to read, and I don’t regret that in the least because, in certain ways, this is honestly the best in the trilogy, and it was a complete joy to spend time in its pages. For perhaps the first time since reading Home Sweet Homicide (1944) by Craig Rice, it was just a pleasure to be immersed in a world, and to not worry about the pace of reading or anything beyond the book itself.

Let’s be clear, though: it’s a successful book because of the way Horowitz has been required to dig down into the world of the prequel novels, Magpie Murders (2016) and Moonflower Murders (2020). I had some misgivings about the book when, between my pre-ordering it last November and it arriving, I read an interview with Horowitz in which he basically said that he only wrote it so that a third series of the TV series spun from these novels could be produced, and they didn’t prove completely unfounded. As a mystery, it’s easily the weakest Horowitz has yet written, but it’s perhaps on account of this — needing to fill out the milieu given that there’s a dearth of clewing and event to fairly point the reader towards the culprit and motive — that the book around the thin mystery is so rich and rewarding.

The plot sees editor Susan Ryeland, who worked with the thoroughly unpleasant Alan Conway on his series of novels featuring the detective Atticus Pünd, giving up her life in Greece to return to the UK. Swiftly thereupon, she is contacted by a publisher who is working with the Eliot Crace, the grandson of famed children’s author Miriam Crace, on an Atticus Pünd ‘continuation’ novel set after Conway’s final book (Conway himself having perished in Magpie Murders — no spoiler). Given Susan’s previous experiences digging into book featuring the character, she is less than enthusiastic:

It was like one of those horror films that come with a number six or seven after the title, where the leading lady, despite having changed her name, gone through therapy and moved to the other side of the world, still finds herself being chased along the corridors by the same maniac with the black robes, the disfigured face and the fifteen-inch kitchen knife.

Of course, she agrees — this would be about Susan Ryeland having coffee and going about her otherwise-uncomplicated life if she didn’t — and, of course, some eerie similarities begin to assert themselves: Alan Conway used his novels to settle scores or hide messages that hinted at much darker themes, and the problematic Eliot seems to be doing the same thing, the characters in his manuscript Pünd’s Last Case exhibiting the initials, characteristics, life events, and general other burdens shared by people in the Crace ménage.

“If you’re using this book as a weapon, you’re the one who could end up getting hurt.”

In this way, Marble Hall Murders very much fulfils the brief of this series, exploring the parallels within a work of fiction that could be harmful to someone in the real world. What makes it slightly more interesting is the way Horowitz uses the novel-within-a-novel structure, since Eliot is writing the book in chunks, and so we get the first 30,000 words, then Susan goes about pursuing the leads while we await the next instalment, and so on. It gives events a currency that shows Horowitz really has thought about how to mix his colours this time around, and provides a pleasingly different structure on which to hang events.

The downside of this is, however, that the mystery gets drawn out perhaps a little too thinly, since we can’t be certain of the accuracy or precise analogue of these pasquinades, and so time must be spent widening the gyre, if you will, which sees Susan returning to a world where she bears some responsibility for sending a killer to prison, and the consequences of that ripple through events marvellously. A note up front tells you that this spoils the solution to Magpie Murders, and at first it seemed a little egregious to do so, but Horowitz expands on this thread superbly, having Susan spend time with the killer’s spouse and even the killer themself, and forcing her to confront the way people view her in the light of another’s actions.

“The trouble with you, Susan, is that you’ve been involved in one real-life murder too many and you’ve lost all sense of proportion.”

It’s the sense of hurt, the careful re-establishing herself in a world where people aren’t entirely sure they want her, that comes through most successfully here. This is, perhaps a little uncomfortably, a subtext that could be applied to the book itself given the motivation that saw it come into existence in the first place, but Horowitz is so good with the relationships people share and the way Susan’s actions are suddenly flipped when people feel she is being too nosy — and, let’s face it, she is — that I found it very hard not to get drawn into the human side of this. It might even be, given the deliberate lingering doubts and uncertainty in Horowitz’s series featuring Detective Daniel Hawthorne, the most humane thing he’s written.

For me, though, the mystery suffers, with it taking two-thirds of the book for any of Susan’s loosely-formed fears to come to fruition, and the revelations in the denouement not being cued up as well as they might. One element in particular — er, let’s say a moment of realisation on behalf of our killer — feels so terribly unlikely that I can’t see how it happened like that, and I can’t believe it hadn’t happened in the years before. I’m pretty confident that, even if you were told the killer’s identity before the revelatory chapter, you wouldn’t be able to figure out how or why they killed who they killed, let’s put it like that.

As an examination of legacy, both famous and otherwise, Marble Hall Murders shows how rich a well-written crime novel can be, and invites much that is excellent into the discussion about genre’s place and scope. I’m delighted that Horowitz gave himself the space to explore these ideas so fully, as it adds a dimension that makes this world all the more tangible. Plot fiends need not apply, but those of you willing to immerse yourselves in this, to feel the grit between your fingers that is so often overlooked in more traditional mysteries, are going to have a fabulous time.