The Sentence is Death (2019) by Anthony Horowitz

It’s been too long since I read Anthony Horowitz’s The Word is Murder, so I was looking forward to the sequel, The Sentence is Death. Anthony “Tony” Horowitz (“Tony” for the narrator, “Horowitz” for the author) is still stuck in his three-book contract about the cases of consultant Daniel Hawthorne, who reminds Tony just why he find the man frustrating: Interrupting a tricky shoot of Tony’s show Foyle’s War to announce that there’s a new case.

Richard Pryce is a divorce attorney known as the “Blunt Razor” for his uncompromising honesty in divorce cases, an attitude that’s made him quite a few high-profile enemies. His most prominent one is pretentious poet Akria Anno, as he was representing her now-ex-husband, Adrian Lockwood. She dumped a glass of wine over his head in a restaurant and wished she could have hit him with a bottle. So it doesn’t look good that Pryce was bludgeoned and stabbed to death with an expensive wine bottle. Tony thinks it all sounds too obvious (and besides, the victim was a lawyer. A divorce lawyer), but there are a couple of anomalies at the scene. Such as the fact that Pryce didn’t drink, his last words "What are you doing here? It’s a bit late," and the giant green 182 painted on his wall. And this is only the first mysterious death.

Sentence is a delight. The narrative effortlessly moves from one point to another, constantly giving the reader new information to chew on. The back-and-forth between Tony and Hawthorne is great too. I felt that Horowitz did a good job of making Hawthorne frustrating here, whereas I felt that he was mostly a bit lonely. We get more bits of how irritating (and potentially dangerous) he can be scattered throughout the book instead of a couple of shock moments. Not that there aren’t a few of them, furthering the mystery of just what this guy’s deal is. The suspects are all well-differentiated. I’ve noticed that Horowitz usually doesn’t have a group of suspects who stay in the limelight, but they drift in and out as the story requires, so it’s to his credit that even the suspects who have very little page time are distinctive, with their own secrets. Horowitz also throws in a new compilation: DI Cara Grunshaw, a cop who’s simmering fury and aggression makes Tony wish for the insensitive and manipulative Hawthorne.

The mystery is very well done. It’s stronger than Word. There are more clues this time around, and the key information is given to you earlier than in Word. There are even false solutions this time! There are three layers: the killer for people who are just reading the book for fun and who don’t really care about solving it, the killer for those who think they’re smarter than Anthony Horowitz, and the actual killer. Dear readers, I fell hard and fast for the red herrings and felt very proud of myself. But the actual clues are all there. I’ve read some reviews noting that the final explanation for the number is a bit of a let-down, and I’ll admit that you have to jump through one-to-many logic hoops to figure it out. But I thought it was funny, especially when I realized how boldly Horowitz clued it. There was one bit about a phone call where I was like, "Okay, I guess..." at the explanation, but other than that, I had no issues with the plot.

When I read Word, I thought Horowitz was going to do more with the meta elements. But now that I see he’s mostly being clever (and justly proud of himself!), I could enjoy them more. He’s a great writer, and I’d love to read a behind-the-scenes book about Foyle’s War and his other TV work. Honestly, I’d think the biggest issue is keeping his own timeline straight. This book was written in 2019 but set in 2012, and I wonder if Horowitz struggles to keep his technology and pop culture references straight. It would be easy to slip into writing about modern-day trends and forget that they didn’t exist yet. But he does a good job here. It’s amusing to see Tony mention how he changed names, or reference the previous chapters, or how those chapters provide clues for Hawthorne, or foreshadow his later work. I really like this close-but-not-quite-our-timeline that he's made.

Obviously, I had a blast with the book. I was only going to give this a Recommended, since at the end it doesn’t re-shape the genre and there are better books out there, but I enjoyed this so much that I’m going to bump it up to Highly Recommended. This would honestly be a good entry point to the series, if you happened to see it at your bookstore or library.

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery! In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce.