Magpie Murders is a mystery novel, within a mystery novel. It features an editor, Susan Ryeland, who finds herself informally investigating the death of the writer who wrote the mystery novel that is also embedded in this book.

The secondary mystery featuring Alex Pund is very much your classic small village cosy mystery. The majority of the story is told in one go a few pages in which I appreciate because I would have found it rather distracting if it started and stopped frequently. It was very immersive, and when the story did stop I almost felt a bit disorientated. (I also listened to this on audio which had a different narrator for the two separate mysteries). This was also necessary, as the mystery surrounding Alan Conway (the author of the Alex Pund series) is found dead, and Susan bases a lot of her suspicions on the coincidences or the parallel facts between Conway's life, and the people in the Pund story.

The concept is definitely interesting, but I found that a lot of it was a bit of a stretch. I understand that ultimately the book is more about the various relationships with the mystery novel, but I found that so much of the book was so convoluted that it took away from it and made a lot of it seem rather pointless and disjointed. 

The majority of characters were unlikeable and acted far too suspicious to make you spend time thinking about concepts more than it trying to be a clever mystery. Considering it is a rather long read, especially for a mystery, I found it rather disappointing, as I kept hoping for something to click like in most mystery stories. In fact, I guessed who the killer was in the Susan storyline rather quickly, and I'm usually to thick to guess who did it, and even more so, why. This resulted in me being incredibly frustrated with Susan. 

I have given this 3 stars solely because the Atticus Pund story was enjoyable as a standalone mystery.