Review: The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

Synopsis: One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor - enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service.Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz.

Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.

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Thought I'd read a couple of pages but a few hours later had found that I had finished - that's how much I was invested in the prose. A great first book in a series where I began with book two, but this sets up things up nicely. Horowitz is a master storyteller and our narrator in this tome, as he once again inserts himself into is own novel.

Review: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Synopsis: Alan Conway is a bestselling crime writer. His editor, Susan Ryeland, has worked with him for years, and she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. Alan's traditional formula pays homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. It's proved hugely successful. So successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job.

When Susan receives Alan's latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder at Pye Hall, an English manor house, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects, and plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan reads, the more she realizes that there's another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ambition, jealousy, and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder.

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Two stories intertwined - the story contained in the manuscript for the latest Atticus Pund novel, and the narrative centered around the "real life" narrative of Susan Ryeland and her quest to solve both the mystery of the missing chapter and the death of the manuscript's author, Alan Conway.

As both compelling narratives reach their conclusions, so too do both storylines begin to merge, with the clues left by Alan and Susan's own investigation, providing the reader with all they need to solve the mystery; or will the reader follow the red herrings and fall into the little traps set by both authors?.

Horowitz has a knack for skillfully (and subtly) inserting the reader into the narrative. The more you read, the greater you - the reader - feel invested in happenings and characters, becoming so fully immersed to the point where all else is oblivious. A cracking read!

Review: The Sentence Is Death by Anthony Horowitz

Synopsis: "You shouldn’t be here. It’s too late…"

These, heard over the phone, were the last recorded words of successful celebrity-divorce lawyer. Richard Pryce, found bludgeoned to death in his bachelor pad with a bottle of wine – a 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, to be precise.

Odd, considering he didn’t drink. Why this bottle? And why those words? And why was a three-digit number painted on the wall by the killer? And, most importantly, which of the man’s many, many enemies did the deed?

Baffled, the police are forced to bring in Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne >and his sidekick, the author Anthony, who’s really getting rather good at this murder investigation business.

But as Hawthorne takes on the case with characteristic relish, it becomes clear that he, too, has secrets to hide. As our reluctant narrator becomes ever more embroiled in the case, he realises that these secrets must be exposed – even at the risk of death…

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For someone who "... had no wish to turn myself into a character, a secondary one at that; the perennial sidekick .." that is exactly what Horowitz has done, quite possibly for the second time, if one reads between the lines correctly.

Anyway, whilst in the midst of filming an episode of "Foyle's War", Dorian Gray like detective, Daniel Hawthorn whisks Horowitz away to investigate the murder of high profile divorce lawyer, Richard Pryce. With some cracking dialogue, basic powers of observation - "... so far I had missed three clues and misconstrued two more. Things were only going to get worse." - Hawthorn and Horowitz must work ahead of the police investigation to solve this little mystery, all while trying to finish filming, re-write scenes, dealing with malevolent police detectives, and attending book club.

Horowtiz is humourous and self deprecating, the naive Watson to Hawthorn's oft-times annoying, condescending, and definitely not PC Holmes. By the end of it all you are left with one question - is it real or just very clever writing .....