Magpie Murders

Magpie Murders is a mystery novel by the British writer Anthony Horowitz, published in 2016. It is the first book in the Susan Ryeland series and is built as a story within a story.

Susan Ryeland edits crime fiction, and her most successful author has delivered a new Atticus Pund mystery, a whodunit set in an English village. As she reads the manuscript, Susan becomes convinced that there is a second story hidden beneath the one she has been given.

The novel prints the Atticus Pund book at length, so the reader works through the same fictional mystery Susan is editing, and then follows Susan's own investigation when the author is found dead and the manuscript proves to be missing its final chapter.

Horowitz has continued the series in Moonflower Murders and Marble Hall Murders, and the first book was adapted into a television drama. The two-strand structure leaves the reader with two puzzles running at once, with details in one bearing on the other.