Magpie Murders

 

I raved about the Hawthorne & Horowitz Series by Anthony Horowitz. He is a prolific writer in multiple genres. Magpie Murders is apparently his best-selling thriller, and I got it in the audiobook format. Once again, he writes about a successful fictional author of crime novels, Alan Conway. His editor, Susan Ryeland has been working with Conway for many years and has already edited many of his novels. However, she becomes suspicious that Conway’s new book actually contains a true-life hidden story of greed and murder. Conway wrote about a detective he named Atticus Pund who is reputed to be the best in the world at what he does. Given the story-within-a-story format, there are many characters to learn about, so the reader has multiple options to choose who the real suspect is. Horowitz is clever and fun. I plan to scan his long list of novels and choose another one in the near future. You won’t be disappointed.

Blunt Instrument

 Blunt Instrument by Amy Bloom made the list by Oprah for Daily Best Book for the Summer. I didn’t think it was that good. I stumbled across this novel in the NY Times Book Review. Ms. Bloom has not previously been reviewed in this blog.

Elderly Professor Bullfinch was bludgeoned to death with a bust of Daniel Hawthorne. It was possible that his death was linked to the struggles in his department at Cromwell University. Bullfinch was not a very popular guy. The university president hired a private detective in an attempt to solve the murder before the police did, therefore being able to keep the matter quiet. 

Although Ms. Bloom is a prolific author, this is her first crime novel. I think I’ll wait for her to develop better crime chops before I read this author again.

Storm Warning

 Storm Warning is the first novel new series which introduces Sonny Marshall as the protagonist. I had already read the second novel, Storm Damage. The story line is pretty good when his beautiful girlfriend ended their relationship because she could not tolerate Sonny’s fixation with helping people who desperately need help. Please read my rave review of the second novel. Sonny is not a cop, not a PI, not a detective. Rather, he’s a successful musician who places the saxophone in a blues and jazz band known as the Storm Lake Blues Band. It was when he was unable to protect his sister from a brutal assault that he began study marshal arts, skills that he would often make use of in his “white knight complex” efforts.

There was one aspect to the story line in the second novel which I did not like. The plot had to do with the kidnapping of exceptionally bright and beautiful children. When one five year old girl was taken and Sonny began learning as much as he could about it, he ran into a police detective in Sacramento, Detective Katrina Hastings, who had been pursuing the kidnapping of a girl for the last seven years. They teamed up and then fell in love. That was a good part of the book. They discovered a ranch in New Mexico where the kidnapped children were taken and being trained. The powers behind the abduction scene wanted to create a master race. It was there intent to make these highly intelligent children run the world because they believed without them, the world would come to a catastrophic end. It’s an old story line of which I’m quite tired.

However, Terry R. Bacon has created a great cast of characters who are quite different than most of the murder mysteries that I read. I really want more of this – hint – so when am I going to see book three?