Yesterday, my husband and I met some friends at the Sepulveda dam. Most of us roller skated, and a couple people just sat around and drank beers and talked. It was really nice, and it was the first time I had been there, plus I had brought the other people along, and in the end it worked out. Made me feel good. It was pretty empty, which surprised me, but apparently (I read later), the cops have been giving out citations for people being there. (There were no signs against it or anything like that.) I wonder if the city gets itchy anytime someone's enjoying themselves but not spending any money.
Also, my husband got published for the first time recently. Really happy for him! It took him over a month to discover that he got published as he was submitting around using an email address he rarely checks.
Blog time!
**SPOILERS**
Horowitz, Anthony – MOONFLOWER MURDERS
Published: 2020
Read: 4/2021
Ex-editor Susan Ryeland is contacted by the owners of a fancy hotel in England. Their daughter has gone missing, and they think it has something to do with a book one of Susan’s former clients wrote. (The client, mystery writer Alan Conway, had died.) The characters in the book were inspired by Conway’s visit to the hotel after the murder of Frances Pendleton, one of the hotel guests. The missing daughter had read the book and concluded that the wrong man was in prison for that crime. Susan investigates and then reads the novel – which is included in full – and then solves the murder.
I really liked Magpie Murders (2016), which follows the same lead characters (Susan, Alan, etc.), but this one I thought was just okay. Maybe it’s because in Magpie, the meta/nesting nature of the novel was, well, novel. This time I’m less impressed by it. Plus the actual mysteries just weren’t that good. There’s a red herring in the “real” murder investigation where a man is trying to get Susan to think he committed the murder because his wife is overbearing and he wants to cow her. It’s such a stretch. And then in the nested mysteries – the one from Conway’s book – one of the solves is straight out of Ocean’s 11.
Horowitz is praised because he writes in the style of the golden age of mystery writers (read: Agatha Christie), but I’m not sure if he himself takes the genre seriously. In this book, he does fine but it doesn’t have the magic of a Christie novel. It doesn’t seem to have the conviction.
Rating: ★★1/2
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