Third Magpie Murders coming!

I spotted this on Friday night and honestly I nearly screamed outloud with excitement:

I’ve been saying for ages that I would like another book in the Susan Ryland series and now my prayers have been answered. I’ve wondered as well how easy it would be to come up with another plot for this given that the author of the Atticus Pund series is dead, and in the second book Susan seemed to have unravelled as many secrets as had been hidden there, so I’m thrilled Horowitz has come up with something – and the blurb is intruiguing:

Susan Ryeland has had enough of murder.

She’s edited two novels about the famous detective, Atticus Pünd, and both times she’s come close to being killed. Now she’s back in England and she’s been persuaded to work on a third.

The new ‘continuation’ novel is by Eliot Crace, grandson of Miriam Crace who was the biggest selling children’s author in the world until her death exactly twenty years ago.

Eliot believes that Miriam was deliberately poisoned. And when he tells Susan that he has hidden the identity of Miriam’s killer inside his book, Susan knows she’s in trouble once again.

As Susan works on Pünd’s Last Case, a story set in an exotic villa in the South of France, she finds more and more parallels between the past and the present, the fictional and the real world – until suddenly she finds that she has become a target.

Someone in Eliot’s family doesn’t want the book to be written. And they will do anything to prevent it.

This is coming out at the end of March and I’ve no idea how recent this announcement actually is – I’ve checked the usual places and there was nothing, but I think it must be pretty recent because it’s the first time Amazon has suggested it to me and that algorithm knows I like Horowitz so suggests them to me on the regular, and of course it hasn’t got a cover yet. Anyway, I’m really excited about it – and in addition to that, the TV adaptation of The Moonflower Murders is hitting the screens in the US this weekend, so hopefully it’ll be here in the UK soon too.