Susan Ryeland’s back, and this time the murder mystery hits even closer to home.

After a stint in sunny Crete trying to play house, Susan Ryeland returns to rainy Crouch End with her classic MG, a rescue cat, and another manuscript that may or may not conceal a real murder.

In Marble Hall Murders, Anthony Horowitz revives his genre-blending detective series for a third outing. If you’ve read Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, you know the drill: Susan, a former book editor turned reluctant sleuth, finds herself entangled in crimes that blur the lines between fiction and reality. The hook? The murder mystery she’s editing mirrors – or foreshadows – an actual case. It’s classic Horowitz: self-aware, Agatha Christie-esque, and smart enough to keep you flipping pages into the night.

This time, the manuscript in question is Pünd’s Last Case, a follow-up to the Atticus Pünd mysteries originally penned by the late Alan Conway. But this new story isn’t by Conway. It’s by Eliot Crace – a second-rate writer Susan knows all too well from a failed series she tried (and failed) to save years ago. Crace is arrogant, reckless, and now mining his own family’s skeletons for source material. His grandmother, children’s author Miriam Crace, died twenty years ago under suspiciously tidy circumstances. His fictional Lady Margaret Chalfont? Also dead, poisoned, and surrounded by conniving heirs.

Of course, Susan spots the parallels immediately. And when a second death hits close to Eliot’s circle, she does what she always does: gets too involved. Ethically blurry decisions? Check. Conflict of interest? Check. Risking arrest and her professional reputation? Of course. It’s all very on-brand for Susan, who seems to have developed a habit of digging herself into holes she’s barely able to climb out of.

Structurally, this third book tweaks the formula. The split between Susan’s world and the Atticus Pünd story is looser than in the previous installments. We get a short lead-in from Susan before being dropped into Crace’s uninspired Pünd manuscript for nearly 130 pages – a stretch that lacks direction and momentum. Unlike in Magpie Murders, where the fictional mystery held immediate relevance, here it takes a while before readers are given anything concrete to sleuth for. If you haven’t read the blurb beforehand, you’d be forgiven for missing the point entirely.

And yet – Horowitz still makes it work. Once things click into place, the meta-layers start snapping together like a trap door. Characters in Eliot’s book mirror real people. Clues are buried in prose. There are anagrams. Secrets. Motives layered beneath motives. Even if the Pünd section feels flat at times (intentionally so – Eliot is no Alan Conway), it eventually justifies its bulk with some smart reveals.

There are some standout additions to the cast: DI Ian Blakeney brings an edge of unpredictability to the investigation – and maybe to Susan’s personal life – while French investigator Frédéric Voltaire adds flair to the Pünd narrative. Horowitz is still having fun with the golden age whodunnit format, peppering in winks and callbacks for the observant reader.

Not every plot thread lands. The final 100 pages feel crammed, like the book remembered it had to wrap up all its arcs and raced to the finish. Some clues are clever; others feel like they were dropped in after the fact. Still, the denouement has style, and Susan’s signature “Never again” rings with ironic finality – we’ve heard that one before.

Ultimately, Marble Hall Murders is a satisfying return to the layered, literary puzzles Horowitz does best. It’s not perfect – the metafictional gimmick strains under its own weight at times – but it’s clever, twisty, and completely absorbing. Here’s hoping Lesley Manville convinces Horowitz to keep the series going. One more case wouldn’t hurt… right?