Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz

I see this book as a tribute to Agatha Christie. It consists of two stories. The first one could be considered as a book within a book, a detective story about 2-3 murders. The detective was a survivor from German concentration camp, a dying man named Atticus Pund. If Sherlock Holmes has Dr Watson and Hercule Poirot has Arthur Hastings, Atticus Pund has James Fraser. In this story, a young woman came to ask the detective's help to clear her fiance's name. The boy had been accused of murdering his own mother, a housekeeper in Pye Hall. At first Pund didn't want to take her case, until when he read a news about another murder in the same house, where the owner of the Pye Hall had been found decapitated. Were the two murders related?

The 2nd story tells about the publishing house who had published 8 books of the Atticus Pund series by Alan Conway. The last book, called Magpie Murders, was missing the last chapters, where the conclusion was, where Atticus Pund told the readers who the killer was. The heroine in this part of the story was the editor, Susan Ryeland. Susan had been given the 9th book (also the last) of the series by the publisher, the CEO of the Cloverleaf Books, Charles Clover; but it lacked the last chapters. Meanwhile, the author, Alan Conway, had been dead. It had been said that he had committed suicide by throwing himself from the tower of his castle. Susan believed that Alan Conway had been murdered, so she started her own investigation to solve the mystery of the murder and to find the missing chapters.

I quite enjoy the book and thinks that the idea of this book was good. However I found the reason behind Alan Conway's murder was silly.