O's Top 20 Books to Read This Summer

Susan Ryeland, Horowitz's accidental protagonist, is a London book editor forced by circumstance to turn sleuth. Her publishing house's surly star writer, Alan Conway, has just submitted the latest installment of his money-minting Atticus Pünd crime series—but without the all-important denouement. Furthermore, he's apparently committed suicide. "It's one thing reading about detectives, quite another trying to be one," Susan grumbles, as she simultaneously tries to figure out what happened to her author and intuit which of his characters Conway would have envisioned as his victim's murderer. Horowitz, a writer for the British TV series Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders, has devised an ingenious whodunit within a whodunit, a metamystery with Agatha Christie roots.