At first, Tony is thinking he can get one over on Hawthorne, since literary festivals and promotion are his domain, but the trip promises to be rough. The various guests don’t have much in common and a few rub Tony the wrong way. Hawthorne is charismatic enough to charm crowds and draw attention away from Tony. And casting his shadow over the gathering is the sponsor, Charles le Mesurier. Le Mesurier is a deeply unpleasant man who has history with some of the guests, cheerfully harasses them, and is the man behind an unpopular power line that’s going to be established on the island. The line will clog the island and smash through the graves of Nazi victims, so there’s plenty of bad blood directed at le Mesurier. Tony is even with him when he finds an ace of spades with a skull on it under his windshield. Not that le Mesurier is concerned. Again, there hasn’t been a murder on Alderney in decades!
After a party at his house, le Mesurier is found stabbed to death in the bunker he used for affairs. He’s been tied to a chair and then stabbed in the throat. Oddly, the killer left his right hand unbound. There’s a footprint in the blood and a coin on the floor. Alderney isn’t really equipped to handle a serious crime (and the detective in charge is lazy), so Hawthorne is asked to lend his assistance, meaning Tony will get his third book out of the trip.
There are plenty of suspects. As mentioned, quite a few members of the group wanted to stab le Mesurier before they got to the island, and he’s happy to give the stragglers a reason to do it too. As usual, Horowitz conveys all these characters with effortless ease. There’s also another man prowling around the island, the real reason Hawthorne wanted to come to Alderney. If you remember from the first book, Hawthorne was kicked off the force after he shoved a pedophile down the precinct stairs. Derek Abbott is that very man and he also has a connection to le Mesurier: He’s his financial advisor. But not for long, since one of the suspects said she heard le Mesurier planning to fire him. The confrontation between him and Hawthorne is memorable.
While I liked this book overall, I had some issues with it. This is another Horowitz where the suspects don’t get a lot of page time. This makes sense for some of them—once their big secret is revealed there’s nothing left for them to do—but some just fade out of the narrative. They feel very disconnected from each other, rarely interacting among themselves. This made sense in the previous books since the suspects really didn’t have much to do with each other already, but the island setting should have meant they were bouncing off each other more. I will give credit that their various secrets and actions on the night of the murder give the crime some texture, but that’s just on a plot level. (Which, to be fair, is what I like.) The motive didn’t hit me as hard as it could either, lacking the raw “oomph” of the previous two books. But I like how it ties into some of the oddities of the crime scene. The explanation for the unbound hand has that macabre touch that wouldn’t be out of place in Alex Rider or Horowitz Horror.
Hawthorne himself is oddly subdued. Outside of his general shadiness around Abbott, he’s not as sinister a figure, and there are less clashes between him and Tony. I don’t mind this too much—I don’t want them to argue in every book—but it stood out here. Hawthorne’s actions near the end are probably the most morally ambiguous, if not outright criminal, things he’s done all series, yet they go without much comment. Tony makes a point that he and Hawthorne traumatize multiple people and wreck lives during their investigation, and I was surprised that Horowitz didn’t do more with that idea.
All of this sounds quite negative, but I really did like the book! Horowitz is one of my favorite modern mystery writers. He does an excellent job of describing the desolate scenery of Alderney. There aren’t as many meta asides, but what is there is always interesting or amusing. (Like Tony fearing that Hawthorne won’t solve the crime before the police do because it means he doesn’t have a book, or, when Hawthorne points out he could just make it up, he protests that “Even when I’m writing fiction I try to write the truth.”) There are also plenty of clues. I admit that I felt that there weren’t as many compared to Sentence or even Moonflower Murders, but there’s enough for the armchair reader to make a good stab at the culprit. The main slip-up Hawthorne catches the killer in is a good one. It’s the kind of thing you accept at face-value and don’t question even when you get information that really should make you wonder about it. I wish there were more clues like that, but what we have is enough.
But shame on Tony for taking my intended solution and going. “Boy it sure it glad I didn’t say that in front of Hawthorne, I would have looked like an idiot.”
All in all, I enjoyed this book. While I thought that Sentence was a better book, this is still a good mystery novel. I wouldn’t start with this if you’re new to the series, but fans of Hawthorne and Horowitz will enjoy this. Recommended.
Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, The Invisible Event, Murder at the Manse (with two others), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Stephen M. Pierce, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).
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