And Then There Were None; Magpie Murders

One of my friends at work told me this is her favorite Agatha Christie book. I knew I had read it, and remembered the basic plot, but couldn't remember the ending, so I reread it. 

Ten people of various backgrounds are lured to Indian Island under false pretenses. When they get there, they are all accused of murder by an anonymous voice on a record. It kind of reminds me of the movie "Clue", which I'm sure borrowed from Christie. At any rate, one by one the guests are murdered in ways that coincide with a nursery rhyme hung up in each room, "The Ten Little Indians" (which was the original title of this book). The remaining guest become very suspicious and wary of each other, but the murders continue until everyone is dead. The ending was very clever, typical of Christie's books. 

 

I put the second book in this series, "Moonflower Murders", on hold, not realizing that "Magpie Murders" came first. I'm glad I decided to read it first, I think I would have been a little lost if I hadn't. 

It was a mystery within a mystery, and very cleverly done, too. The book starts out with Susan, who is an editor for Cloverleaf books, reading the latest manuscript from an author named Alan Conway called "Magpie Murders". We the reader also get to read the manuscript. It was a very charming mystery set in a quaint English village in 1955, starring Conway's signature detective, Atticus Pund. 200+ pages later, Pund announces he has solved the mystery and we turn the page only to discover the last chapter of the manuscript is missing. Susan is understandably annoyed, as are we the readers. Then she hears the news: Conway is dead, apparently by suicide. She tells her boss that she's going to try to find the missing chapter so they can still publish the book, so she travels to his house and talks to everyone in his life only to discover that many of them don't believe Alan committed suicide but was actually murdered. At this point we need a scorecard to keep track of everything: Susan is trying to determine if Alan was murdered and also where the last pages of the manuscript went so we can find out who the murder was in "Magpie Murders". I love Horowitz, all of his books have been so well written.