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A quick premise: I adore crime novels. Not the cheap ones where you get the author’s scope and intentions or its whodunnit/whydunnit within its first quarter. Those have been far and between, hallelujah. Police procedurals, noir, hard-boiled detective stories, cosy mysteries, legal thrillers and the general suspense ones. There are some very fine crime writers out there, past and present. At home I have hundreds and hundreds of their works.

I had been hearing about Magpie Murders for quite some time but didn’t find the right moment (or more probably, concentration). Last January I couldn’t resist any longer. I had never read any work of Anthony Horowitz before. My bad. To make amends this year I will delve into another Horowitz novel waiting on my bedside table: The Word is Murder.

It is an almost 600-pages book with a unique layout and which made it quite hard for me to constantly update my reading status on Goodreads. You’ll get it when you lay hands on a copy.

The use of magpie in the title has a double entendre: a) magpie in literature is a symbol of deception and trickery, and these are staple ingredients in a crime novel; and b) the famous magpie rhyme – ” One for sorrow; Two for joy; Three for a girl; Four for a boy; Five for silver; Six for gold; Seven for a secret, never to be told; Eight for a wish; Nine for a kiss; Ten for a bird you must not miss.” The cover contains a lot of symbology and clues too. The novel is rich full of such clues and play with words (hint: pay attention to each character’s surname).

It is an absolutely mind-blowing crime novel inside another crime novel. Definitely one of a kind. It pays homage in a superb way to the world of Agatha Christie and Cluedo. I devoured it in a week and a half (considering it’s almost 600 pgs and all the other things I need to juggle) and I found myself immersed into the world of Alan Conway (who is a crime writer), Atticus Pünd (the detective character he created), authors, editors, publishers, greed, satire, irony, homages, clues and above all, murder(s).

Cause as the great Arthur Conan Doyle used to say: “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”