By Dennis Fischman

Among the readers in the Somerville Public Library’s Mystery Book Club, there are people who love every subgenre of mystery. At the far ends of the mystery spectrum, there are cozies, and then there are thrillers involving psychopathic serial killers. Never the twain shall meet…or shall they?

In recent years, the cozy has become a recognized formula within the mystery genre. Its elements include an amateur sleuth, usually a woman, who’s not a private investigator but a librarian, a bookstore owner, a domestic servant, a restaurant reviewer, someone who runs an ice cream parlor…or, as in Cloche and Dagger, a high-end hat shop.

The motive for the murder is usually simple: jealousy, revenge, or greed. The violence occurs offstage and is not particularly bloody. The sex, too, occurs offstage, if it occurs at all. In fact, many cozy mysteries share a border with romance novels, and the characters who live in both genres find themselves alternately pining for a man and completely despising him because of some misunderstanding or other. (There are lesbian and bisexual cozy mysteries, too, but I haven’t read them yet!)

“Magpie Murders”
By Anthony Horowitz.
Harper, 2017.

The opposite of a cozy is one where a murderer kills one victim after another in a gruesome manner to sate some psychological quirk in his or her own personality. The investigator may be a police force. It may be another professional, like Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta in the series written by Patricia Cornwell.

Or, it may be someone in an unexpected profession, who could have been the hero in a cozy – except that the murderer is a sociopath. That describes Susan Ryeland in Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz, to a T.

Susan is an editor at a small publishing house that has a tremendously successful author named Alan Conway. He writes mysteries featuring detective Atticus Pund. His latest submission, however, features some characters that bear a striking resemblance to real people. That intrigues Susan. So does the fact that Alan flies into a rage when his publishers make the seemingly innocuous suggestion of calling his book “The” Magpie Murders.

And then, Alan dies. Is it really suicide, or is something more serious going on?

Susan has to investigate. Not only does she have a sense that injustice is going unpunished, but she also has a publishing house in financial distress to save! To solve the real-life crime (and prevent more murders), she is going to have to delve deeply into Alan’s book and the clues buried inside it.

I don’t usually like serial killer mysteries, much less ones where a sociopath ends up being the culprit. To me, they violate the rule that the author has to play fair with the readers and give us a chance to solve the mystery ourselves. That may be exactly why Magpie Murders is the exception. I enjoyed it (and the TV version starring Lesley Manville as Susan and Tim McMullan as Atticus) because even without knowing the “why,” it’s possible to figure out the “who.” And you don’t even have to think like a sociopath to do it!