Though this is a big book - almost 600 pages - I read it in a weekend - and I wasn't slacking on my chores or social activities either, I just came back to it whenever I could and raced through it because it was just so good! 

Horowitz is such a clever, inventive and interesting writer. So often I read him thinking this is his best book yet - but this really is!

This is the third in the stories about editor Susan Ryeland. It very much stands alone as a novel but it continues where book two - 'Moonflower Murders' - left off. If you didn't read it, you may have caught it on tv starring Lesley Manville and the screen adaptation of this book is already underway.

Susan Ryeland is a publisher and an editor and she has worked on two novels about the detective Atticus Pund. Now she's been asked to take up the third. The creator, Alan Conway, has died but this book will be 'a continuation novel' by Eliot Crace who has taken on the characters and characteristics of the original books. Eliot has a good pedigree - he is the grandson of Miriam Crace who was the biggest selling children’s author in the world until her death twenty years previously.

Eliot has his own issues, though. He believes that Miriam was deliberately poisoned. In wanting to bring about justice, he has hidden the identity of Miriam’s killer inside his novel. As Susan reads the manuscript of the book, she uncovers parallels between the past and the present, the fictional and the real world and these revelations mean that she is increasingly putting herself in danger.

This is such a great read! I love a murder mystery anyway but it's set in the world of publishing and Anthony Horowitz can't resist making his own comments and observations about writing and bookselling past and present. Loved it!