Amusing Whodunnit ‘Magpie Murders’ Delivers Quaint Mystery Within a Mystery: TV Review

variety.com:

Amber Dowling One for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold. Seven for a story yet to be told.

Or, in the case of this “Magpie,” make that two stories yet to be told. The latest limited series from PBS’s Masterpiece, “Magpie Murders,” may be derived from the popular children’s nursery rhyme, but the way director Peter Cattaneo unfolds the mystery within a mystery in this whodunnit is anything but child’s play.

The story, based on the 2016 novel by Anthony Hororwitz (the first in The Susan Ryeland series), begins when famed author Alan Conway (Conleth Hill, Varys from “Game of Thrones”) dies shortly after handing in his new manuscript: “Magpie Murders.” The man’s death is suspicious, and the final chapter of his story is missing, setting up a meta mystery within a mystery that’s as much fun to follow as it is to solve.

Hororwitz, one of the main writers of the British crime drama “Midsommer Murders,” adapted his own work here. In the present day, Alan’s editor Susan (Lesley Manville, “Phantom Thread”) isn’t convinced her author’s death was an accident.