Book Club 2025: Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

There’s something a bit… decadent about these books. They’re about an editor who edits mystery books, so we get an entire other mystery inserted into the book, and then she’s also (of course) involved with a mystery of her own that ties into (and has clues from) the “inner” book. It’s for people who have read so many mysteries that they’re blaze and want to read several mysteries at the same time. Or as the kids say: Dawg, I heard you like mysteries, so I put a mystery in your mystery so that you can read a mystery while you’re reading another mystery. (What is that you say? That thing is 21 years old? NEVER MIND)

It’s well written, and it’s fun, but it’s not as good as the first one. For one, the mystery in the book-within-the-book only had one possible solution, and it was really obvious from the start. Which made it really annoying to read the editor trying to puzzle out what the solution could be, because it just made her seem kinda stupid. And speaking of which — this also didn’t really have much of a motivation for her to get involved in her own mystery this time around. It’s like she was just kinda bored, so why not start interrogating people? It didn’t really hang together…

But it’s pretty entertaining. Since it’s two mystery novels in one, it manages to defend its almost six hundred pages, but only barely.

Horowitz seems to indicate that this will be the final book of the series, and he only wrote it because the actor who plays the editor in the TV adaptation said that she really wanted to have a third season. Which is a good motivation as any to write a mystery, I guess? But hearing that, I went “ah, that explains it” — it just feels ever so slightly strained and artificial.

But it’s fine. It’s plenty diverting.

Marble Hall Murders (2025) by Anthony Horowitz (buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)

Concerts in Oslo Updated A Bit

I’ve gone through the list of venues and added new ones that have appeared in Oslo over the last year, so the Concerts in Oslo web site (and apps for iOS and Android) should now be more updated.

The site works by scraping the web pages of counts on fingers 84 venues and tries to make sense of the concert listings. Of course, these days many venues outsource the listings to Facebook, which is a blessing and a curse: It means that I don’t have to write scraping software for so many different sites, but it’s also just kinda difficult to actually scrape Facebook:

Because the HTML is (I guess purposefully?) obfuscated to make it difficult to do what I’m doing. Gotta keep the users on the site!

But so far, so good, I guess — I mean, they change the HTML frequently, and since it’s so obfuscated, the software basically has to guess at what the concert listing is, so sometimes there’s a gazillion bogus entries that I have to clear out manually and then stare at the code for a couple of hours.

(It’s fun when they change the dates from “THURSDAY 24th” to “NEXT THURSDAY” to “THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW” to “C’MON YOU KNOW WHEN” or whatever the next thing is going to be.)

Oh, well.

Anyway, if there’s any venues in Oslo that I’ve missed that you think should be listed, drop me a note.