Magpie Murders is Anthony Horowitz’s gift to armchair detectives: a meta murder mystery.

Narrator Susan Ryeland is the ultimate whodunit fan as well as the editor of her publishing house’s best-selling mystery writer, Alan Conway. She is the first reader of his newest soon-to-be bestseller, and the first to discover the final chapter is missing. She’s not the first to hear of Conway’s sudden suicide, but she is the first to suspect that he may have been pushed to his death, and that the clues to the killer’s identity lie in that first unfinished draft.

Ryeland is a bumbling, barely capable detective, but readers will enjoy her self-aware references to Agatha Christie, red herrings, shady plot twists, and other hallmarks of the genre.