Because in the darkness

I've added on the Magpie Murders tag because I wasn't expecting the second season to have a different name.

Susan went off to Crete with her boyfriend Andreas at the end of Magpie Murders to help him realize his dream of taking over a family run hotel or something like that. Moonflower Murders doesn't cover the getting there part, so it's a year later, and she's worn down by the work involved in running a hotel. Something is going on with the bank, and the chef quits after not being paid; the water tank on the roof springs a leak, damages the roof, and floods the kitchen; and things just aren't going well. To say nothing of her missing being an editor and sometimes struggling with the language.

When a couple stop by from England with the offer to pay Susan £10,000 to help them find their daughter, she takes the offer. Granted, I don't blame Andreas for being a little surprised that she's leaving in like 24 hours, but he knows that the hotel is quite possibly going to close without that money. The arrival of Atticus Pünd is a sign for Susan, even though she's really not sure if Alan Conway's loosely inspired book actually has the answer to a real murder. (The parents know that their daughter thought she knew who the real murderer was after reading the book, and she's either in hiding or has been kidnapped due to that belief.)

The Pünd story is in 1950s Devonshire. An injured and retired actress has tried to start a hotel called The Moonflower Hotel, which was named after the Moonflower Wing of the real hotel. I think she's played by the 'real' haughty sister instead of the missing one, and we weren't introduced to a partner for her in E1, so the actress' husband is currently just the actor who played Harry in the Charmed reboot. The missing daughter's husband plays the financial advisor, the guy who played Moriarty in Sherlock plays the 'real' dead guy [Parris] and a Pünd suspect [Berlin], and I think the 'real' parents are the two who manage the day-to-day Moonflower Hotel operations, who are kinda giving off skimming money vibes. So far, the housekeeper and her son in the Moonflower Hotel don't have a 'real' counterpart, and the guy convicted of Parris' murder isn't in the Pünd story. (All the extended family and friends who attended the wedding at the hotel on the same day Parris was killed are sorta visual filler for now. Maybe there's cross-story overlap in dual casting side characters, but they not get seen or mentioned again.)

I should probably work on getting all the names figured out, but that's mostly who we were introduced to. The actress was found strangled in her home with several possible suspects, and Susan was on the flight back to London, reading. Odds are, going to the real hotel will rustle something up, or we wouldn't have much of a story, but I do appreciate that Susan isn't overly confident in her sleuthing skills. She's spent most of her life being an editor, dabbled very briefly in Magpie Murders in solving one mystery that came very close to killing her, and she's debating if she wants to stay in the UK and get an editor job instead of going back to the Trifillini (possibly the incorrect name of Andreas' hotel).