Susan Ryeland has had quite enough of murder, Alan Conway and Atticus Pünd. She’s come close to being killed twice while investigating the secrets that Conway hid inside his novels, and wants nothing more to do with them. But, back in England and in need of money, she receives an offer that she can’t refuse – edit Pünd’s Last Case, a continuation novel that is being written.

But the author, Eliot Crace, is a somewhat disturbed young man, scarred from his life with his grandmother, the children’s author Miriam Crace. Eliot is convinced that Miriam was poisoned, rather than dying from natural causes, and, like Conway before him, he is using Pünd’s Last Case to tell the truth about her murder. But the book isn’t finished yet, and clearly someone doesn’t want it to see print. And it seems that Susan is one of the obstacles that needs to be taken care of.

Well, I thought I’d better get round to reading this before I see some spoilers for the TV adaptation that’s just cropped up on the BBC. This has been sitting on my shelf since Christmas, I think, mocking me with it’s colossal page count. OK, it’s 590 pages, but that’s long for a mystery novel for a little old blogger who wants to cram in as many books as possible every month. But I’ve already clocked up eighteen reviews this month, so I figured I could put aside a few days for this one.

Yeah, I read it in a day. Admittedly, I didn’t do much else that day, but I didn’t want to. Damn, but Horowitz knows what he’s doing. I praised the last Hawthorne mystery , A Deadly Episode, for hiding clues in plain sight and still pulling the wool over my eyes, and, yes, he did it again.

Actually, I did solve a bit of it – I think there are three aspects to work out here, and I definitely figured out one of them. The other two here – in case you haven’t encountered the series before, you have the real-world murder and the book murder to solve – caught me out. Admittedly, the book murder isn’t quite as interesting as the real-world one, but the intricateness of the real world one (which gets a higher page count than the novel) more than compensates. I thought it was damn clever, and I was nowhere near the truth of it.

I won’t say too much else about the book, as I think it’s best read knowing as little as possible, but it’s such an impressive work, both structurally and with regards the characters. Susan’s developing friendship with… someone,,, as problems start piling up is a really nice bit, and I also really enjoyed the erratic character of Eliot, trying to work out what he was up to, and wondering why he was taking such an obtuse way of doing it. I found it a real page-turner, which is a good job due to the number of pages.

It’s quite incredible to think that Horowitz had to rush writing this (apparently) and do the script for the adaptation at basically the same time, because it really doesn’t show. I presume this is the end of the road for Susan Ryeland, but it’s good to see her going out on a high. But maybe never say never…