Monthly Archives: December 2020

You may think you haven’t heard of Anthony Horowitz, but you’ve probably been eagerly consuming the various wonderful British TV series that he’s created or to which he’s contributed. Foyle’s War, anyone? Collision? Midsomer Murders? Agatha Christie’s Poirot? And then there are his entertaining mystery novels, like Moonflower Murders.

The prolific Horowitz has command of all the mystery genres and he riffs on them all. Moonflower Murders is the second in his Susan Ryeland series; it’s a classic country house murder with some twists. I read the first one in the series, Magpie Murders, when it came out in 2016 and enjoyed it, but, frankly, I couldn’t give you any details. Pure entertainment goes into the fizzy portion of my brain and when the fizz vanishes, so does the plot. (That’s not a criticism of the book!)

It’s hard to give a short plot summary of this mystery because it’s layered and has a complicated setup (but it’s very easy to follow on the page). Susan Ryeland, the repeating character in the series, is a former fiction editor who’s now in Crete with her boyfriend; they own a small hotel. In her literary life, one of her most successful authors was Alan Conway, who wrote a very popular mystery series. Conway was murdered. A mystery author murdered? This is the first inkling for the reader that life and art will be very much intertwined.

A British couple, the Trehernes, come to see Susan and ask for her help. They own a posh boutique hotel in Suffolk where there was a grisly murder eight years earlier. Their daughter Cecily has just gone missing after reading a mystery that references that murder. The author of the mystery? Alan Conway, Susan’s murdered author. The Trehernes believe that their daughter saw something in Conway’s novel that related to the eight year old murder and now she’s in danger. They want Susan to visit the hotel and re-read the mystery to see if she can figure out what their daughter might have discovered. There is someone in jail for the murder, but it’s not at all clear that he did it. Is the real murderer after Cecily? 

Susan’s intrigued and she needs a break from the hectic pace at the hotel in Crete, so off she goes. Then the fun starts: the multiple characters with motives, the secret financial problems, the red herrings, and the illicit relationships. Horowitz even includes the full text of Alan Conway’s earlier novel so the reader can try to find the answer for herself. It’s quite an entertaining romp.

In addition to Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, I read another Horowitz mystery, The Word is Murder, in which the author himself becomes Watson to a surly detective’s Sherlock. The connections between life and art in these novels are brilliant and fun. Horowitz’s style is just right for these mysteries: a little breezy, just the right level of detail to be atmospheric, and a raft of idiosyncratic characters.

These are some of the best books I read this year: I worked hard to winnow the list down to seven fiction and seven nonfiction titles. Not all were published in 2020. If I wrote a post about a book, I’ve provided the link.  They’re just in order by title.

FICTION

The Abstainer by Ian McGuire
A very literate historical thriller about an Irish policeman in Manchester, England in 1867. See my post here.

 

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
An immersive, frightening, and all-too-realistic story about a mother and son on the run from a Mexican drug lord. Will they reach the U.S. border before the cartel’s henchman catch them?

 

Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III
An ex-con father wants to see his estranged daughter in this haunting tale. See my post here.

 

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
This is auto-fiction with a raw, hungry immediacy. Akhtar’s linked stories about life in the U.S. as a Muslim, the son of immigrant parents, are unforgettable, often shocking. He writes about the bigotry he experiences as a Muslim, the narrowmindedness in his own community, and and the way those things affect his feelings about living in the U.S. It’s the right book for this time.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
The third and final volume in Mantel’s brilliant fictional life of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from the son of a blacksmith to Henry VIII’s confidant and enforcer. See my post here.

 

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
Eerily prescient, Donoghue’s latest claustrophobic novel is set in a hospital during the influenza pandemic of 191x and follows a nurse who cares for pregnant women who have the flu. I found this riveting for its carefully drawn characters and emotional content.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
A coming of age novel, a trenchant commentary on the lives we live today, full of brilliant set pieces, Lerner’s novel delves into many aspects of our cultural dysfunction. See my post here.

 

NONFICTION

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling
Powell is often called the English Proust; I read his magnum opus, the 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time years ago and loved it. A trenchant picture of English society in the first half of the twentieth century. See my short post here.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson makes the case that caste not racism accounts for the way Blacks have been treated in our society. India and Nazi Germany provide other examples of caste-based systems to make the argument clear. An important book to read now.

Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, and a Half-Dozen Revolutions by Annik LaFarge
A short but pithy life of Chopin and his music. See my post here.

 

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
Demick follows the life of citizens in a small town in Tibet before and after the Chinese takeover. See my post here.

 

Georgia O’Keefe: A Life by Roxana Robinson
I am sure this is the best biography about O’Keefe and a model of biographical writing. I love Robinson’s fiction, too: Cost and Sparta are among my favorites.

 

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by Alan Mikhail
Mikhail explores the fraught relationship between the Ottoman Turks and Europe in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. See my post here.

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn
Mendelsohn, a classics scholar writes about the Odyssey and his father, joining their stories together in remarkable ways. Read my post here.

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