Moonflower Murders follows Susan Ryeland, a former London book editor now running a struggling small hotel in Crete with her Greek partner Andreas, who is drawn back to England when a wealthy couple offers her a substantial sum to find their missing daughter. Cecily Treherne vanished shortly after realising that a novel written about a real murder at her family’s Suffolk hotel eight years earlier had convicted the wrong man—leaving Susan to unravel the mystery hidden within a book-within-a-book, working alongside her own creation, the fictional Golden Age detective Atticus Pünd.
Moonflower Murders is a British-American mystery drama that premiered on PBS Masterpiece in the US from 15 September 2024 and on BBC One in the UK from 16 November 2024, serving as the direct sequel to 2022’s acclaimed Magpie Murders. Both series are adapted by bestselling novelist Anthony Horowitz from his own Susan Ryeland novels, produced by Eleventh Hour Films in association with Salt Films for BBC Studios and Masterpiece, with Jill Green as executive producer and Suzanne McAuley producing. The six-part series reunites Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread, Mum, The Crown) as Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan (Patrick Melrose, The Crown) as Atticus Pünd, the fictional Golden Age detective invented by the equally fictional (and now deceased) crime novelist Alan Conway, whose murder Susan solved in the first series.
The story finds Susan and her boyfriend Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis) a year on from the events of Magpie Murders, now running a small, chronically understaffed hotel on the coast of Crete—a far cry from Susan’s old London publishing life, and a relationship increasingly strained by exhaustion and overwork. Her quiet island idyll is interrupted when Lawrence and Pauline Treherne (Adrian Rawlins and Claire Rushbrook), wealthy owners of Branlow Hall, a hotel in Suffolk, arrive with an unusual proposition: eight years earlier, advertising executive Frank Parris was murdered at their hotel on the day of their daughter Cecily’s wedding, and Romanian maintenance man Stefan Codrescu was convicted after confessing. When Cecily read Alan Conway’s novel Atticus Pünd Takes the Case—a thinly disguised fictionalisation of the real murder—she became convinced the wrong man was jailed, called her parents to say so, and then disappeared without a trace. Offered £10,000 to investigate, Susan returns to England, using her intimate editorial knowledge of Conway’s manuscript to hunt for the clues hidden within the fiction that might explain both the original murder and Cecily’s vanishing.
The series’ structural conceit—continuing directly from Magpie Murders—interweaves three separate timelines: the present-day 2023 investigation, a 2015 storyline crucial to unravelling the central mystery, and the 1950s-set “novel within the novel” following Atticus Pünd’s own fictional investigation at the fictional Moonflower Hotel. This “book-within-a-book” format, in which clues embedded in a Golden Age-style pastiche mystery hold the key to solving a genuinely contemporary crime, is the series’ defining trademark, allowing Horowitz to indulge his evident affection for classic Agatha Christie-style plotting whilst layering it beneath a more modern, character-driven investigation. The returning ensemble includes Daniel Mays as Detective Superintendent Locke (doubling as Pünd’s fictional police counterpart Chubb), Conleth Hill as the late Alan Conway, and Matthew Beard and Sanjeev Kohli reprising supporting roles, joined by new cast members including Mark Gatiss, Rosalie Craig, Pippa Bennett-Warner, and Adrian Rawlins.
Critical reception continued the warm reception afforded to Magpie Murders (for which Horowitz received an Edgar Award), with reviewers praising the sequel’s “ingenious” plotting and the ongoing chemistry between Manville and McMullan. Following Moonflower Murders’ success, PBS Masterpiece and the BBC commissioned Marble Hall Murders, the third and final instalment in Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland trilogy, with Manville and McMullan confirmed to reprise their roles once again—cementing the franchise’s status as one of the more structurally inventive and critically respected entries in the current wave of British literary mystery adaptations.
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📚 Original Author
Anthony Horowitz, CBE, is one of Britain’s most prolific and successful crime and thriller writers, known for creating both the Alex Rider young-adult spy series and the Susan Ryeland literary mystery novels, of which Moonflower Murders (2020) is the second instalment following Magpie Murders (2016). Horowitz’s Ryeland novels are distinguished by their layered, self-referential “book within a book” structure—each pairs a contemporary investigation led by book editor Susan Ryeland with a complete Golden Age-style mystery novel (attributed to a fictional deceased author, Alan Conway) embedded within the narrative, whose plot holds hidden clues to the real crime Susan is investigating. This structural ambition, combined with Horowitz’s evident deep affection for and knowledge of classic detective fiction (particularly Agatha Christie), earned Magpie Murders an Edgar Award and established the Ryeland series as a critically acclaimed, bestselling meta-commentary on the mystery genre itself. Horowitz has also written extensively for television throughout his career, including Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War, giving him direct hands-on experience adapting his own intricate plotting for the screen. Follows Magpie Murders.
Horowitz adapted Moonflower Murders for television himself, continuing his hands-on creative role from Magpie Murders and ensuring the novels’ distinctive structural conceit translated faithfully to the screen. The series was directed by Rebecca Gatward (Bad Sisters), who also served as an executive producer, working from Horowitz’s scripts to realise the show’s demanding three-timeline structure across present-day Crete and Suffolk, a 2015 storyline, and the 1950s-set Atticus Pünd mystery. The series was produced by Eleventh Hour Films in association with Salt Films, for BBC Studios and PBS Masterpiece, with Jill Green as executive producer and Suzanne McAuley (who also produced Magpie Murders) as producer—continuity in the production team that helped maintain tonal consistency between the two series. Horowitz has spoken enthusiastically of the collaboration, describing the filming process as being watched “with joy,” and the creative team’s success in adapting both novels led directly to the commissioning of Marble Hall Murders as the trilogy’s concluding chapter, with Horowitz again adapting and Green again executive producing.
