I’ve been waiting for this book for five years and here it is at last: the third (and it seems, final) book in Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland series. Apparently we have the actress Lesley Manville to thank for the fact that it’s been written at all – after starring as Susan in the recent BBC adaptations of Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, she told Horowitz she was desperate for a chance to play the character for a third time! If you haven’t read the previous two books I would recommend at least reading Magpie Murders before this one (there’s a note at the start of the book to warn us that it does contain spoilers).

In Marble Hall Murders, Susan is back in England having separated from Andreas and left him behind in Crete. Now working as a freelance editor, she attends a meeting with the publisher of Causton Books, Michael Flynn, who suggests an exciting new project to her. Three new continuation novels of the Atticus Pünd mystery series have been commissioned and as Susan had worked on the original novels with the late author Alan Conway, she’s the obvious choice to edit the new books as well. She agrees to take the job, but when she hears that Eliot Crace will be writing the novels, she’s less enthusiastic. Eliot’s previous novels were failures and the man himself she remembers as unpleasant and unreliable. That was a long time ago, though, so maybe things have changed.

When Susan receives a manuscript from Eliot containing the first part of the first continuation novel, Pünd’s Last Case, it’s much better than she expected and perfectly captures Alan Conway’s writing style. However, Susan quickly spots another similarity. Like Alan before him, Eliot appears to be putting coded messages into the book: anagrams, characters based on his own family members – and maybe even clues to a twenty-year-old real life crime.

Pünd’s Last Case is set in 1955 in the South of France where private detective Atticus Pünd and his assistant, James Taylor, are investigating the death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, an Englishwoman who drank poisoned tea just before her lawyer was due to arrive to discuss her will. The culprit seems obvious, but Pünd is sure there’s more to the situation than meets the eye. As Susan reads the manuscript and watches Pünd’s Last Case unfold, she becomes convinced that Eliot is drawing parallels with the death of his own grandmother, the world-famous children’s author Miriam Crace. Hoping to find out more, she travels to Miriam’s former home, Marble Hall, now a popular tourist attraction, where she discovers that although Eliot may want the truth about his grandmother made public, everyone else wants it to remain a secret!

I enjoyed this as much as the first two books. As usual, the Pünd story is so good I would have happily read it as a standalone without the framing story around it. I liked Pünd’s relationship with Frédéric Voltaire, the police detective from Paris who is conducting the official investigation, and I loved the French setting – although Susan Ryeland doesn’t and wants Eliot Crace to switch it back to England. She has her reasons for this, as she’s looking at the book from the perspective of an editor as well as a reader (something which gives Horowitz lots of opportunities to explore various aspects of the editing and publishing process). The mystery surrounding Miriam Crace and her family is also fascinating. She’s a fictional character but surely inspired by Enid Blyton – an author whose books (in Miriam’s case a series called The Little People) have delighted generations of children, but who is considered cold and unloving by her own children and grandchildren.

I picked up on some of the clues in both the Atticus Pünd story and the contemporary one before Susan did, but there was still a lot that I didn’t guess and the solutions to both mysteries weren’t quite what I’d expected. I was happy with the way the book ended, but also sorry if this really is the final one! I do love Horowitz’s Daniel Hawthorne series as well, so I hope there’ll at least be more of those on the way. Meanwhile, I’ll look forward to the TV adaptation of Marble Hall Murders, having enjoyed the first two!

Thanks to Century for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.