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.

The Word is Murder (2018) by Anthony Horowitz

No matter what, I can’t seem to get away from detectives named Hawthorne.

A couple of years ago, I read and reviewed Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders after seeing positive comments about it from other bloggers. I ended up enjoying it so much that I grabbed his next mystery novel, The Word is Murder, almost sight unseen. But would it prove to be another solid example of the modern mystery novel?

The book opens with Diana Cowper planning her own funeral; not an uncommon occurrence for those who want to make things easier for their families. But six hours later, she’s been strangled to death in her home, a bizarre and baffling crime that demands examination by an expert. Enter Daniel Hawthorne, a former police officer who was “kicked out for reasons that weren’t made clear” and who now serves as a sometimes consultant for the police when they’re dealing with an “unusual” case. Hawthorne is called in to investigate, and Anthony Horowitz is following him and writing it all down.

Horowitz (who I will refer to as “Tony” to distinguish him from the author Anthony Horowitz) is fresh off writing Foyle’s War and The House of Silk, and is looking for new ideas. Hawthorne approaches him with a proposal: Tony follows him around and details his case, and they split the profits fifty-fifty. Tony is reluctant, but after being accused of not writing about “real people” at a literary festival, he takes Hawthorne up on his offer.

This book has plenty of meta moments in it, and honestly it was slightly hard for me to keep track at first: for example, Chapter 3 is titled “Chapter One” and revolves around Hawthorne’s reaction to the actual Chapter 1 of the book, and the inaccuracies Tony put in there. That are still in the current Chapter 1. And then Tony follows up by going, “Fine, ignore everything that he mentioned, but the rest is true, including the clue to the killer’s identity.” There’s another chapter where Tony meets with who I assume was Horowitz’s agent at the time, and she says that she doesn’t want to be named in the chapter titled “Lunch with Hilda.” In fairness, my confusion was more due to me trying to read too much into the meta, and the mystery doesn’t hinge on you being able to navigate it. Horowitz uses it all well, and I found his discretions on his different works and writing in general to be very interesting.

Of course, the partnership isn’t smooth sailing: Tony finds Hawthorne frustrating and evasive about his life, and gets a taste of the man’s more unpleasant opinions during the case. I admit though that Hawthorne didn’t come off nearly as offensive as intended. I may have had incorrect expectations based on what I’d read about the book, but Tony came off as the prickly, insulting one to me. Perhaps this is because Hawthorne’s more repulsive moments (like his homophobia) either don’t play a major role or don’t get a lot of development (like the sting in the tail at the end). For most of the book, he comes off as an intense but awkward guy who (based on my reading) does value Tony’s companionship more than he shows. Of course, I also have the expectation that Holmes-Watson style relationships will end with the Watson realizing that the Holmes is indeed a genius who has all the right answers, so that influenced me as well.

I mentioned how Tony teases you with a clue to the killer’s identity in Chapter 1. This is partly true. The clue is there, but you won’t realize its significance until late in the book. I would say that this is a fair mystery on the whole; you can piece the killer’s identity together before the reveal, but the full motive behind the crime won’t become apparent until near the end. It’s more like the “modern-day” narrative of Magpie Murders, more a procedural than a more traditional mystery. The killer is well-hidden, and as I said, you can figure out who they are with a bit of thought.

All in all, I quite liked this book. The meta aspects were fun, the mystery was well-constructed, and it was a joy to read. Highly Recommended.

Other Reviews: ahsweetmysteryblog, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, crossexaminingcrime, The Invisible Event.

Magpie Murders (2017) by Anthony Horowitz

This post is only half-finished.

Other than watching Operation: Stormbreaker when I was younger (apparently it was bad, not that I noticed), I never had any experience with Anthony Horowitz. I knew that he wrote the Alex Rider books, and later learned that he created Foyle’s War (which I haven’t seen) and did episodes of Poirot (ditto). But then he comes out with this book called Magpie Murders and everyone loves it. Now, I was reluctant. As a firm and irrational skeptic about modern attempts at mystery, I held off, but after seeing good things said about his two most recent mystery novels I decided to take the plunge.

The book takes place in the 1950s, in a little village called Saxby-on-Avon. It’s a quiet little town, with the only real excitement recently being the funeral of Mary Blakiston, a servant in the home of local lord Sir Magnus Pye. The village shows up for the funeral, but some are quite fine with her death, as she was an infamous busybody. However, her death was a tragic accident, falling down the stairs in Sir Pye’s locked house. But this is a traditional village mystery, and some are wondering, especially since her son Robert is known for stabbing a man…

These wagging tongues drive his fiancee Joy Sanderling to Atticus Pund, a survivor of the camps who is known as an amateur detective. She wants him to come and disprove the rumors and show that Mary’s death was an accident, but unbeknownst to her Pund is dying and has his own project to complete, and besides he can’t do much if the death really was just an accident. Joy goes away disappointed, but Pund finds himself in Saxby-on-Avon anyway when Sir Pye turns up dead in his home, his head chopped off with a sword…

I actually liked this one. I will say that I felt that Horowitz didn't have (or if he did he didn't show it here) Christie’s gift of being able to quickly give information about setting and characters and still keep things moving. It stood out to me because I just read The Mysterious Affair at Styles right before this, although in that book at least some of that brevity can be put down to Christie’s focus on the plot. Horowitz felt a little blunter about the exposition, but still does a good job at getting into the heads of the various suspects and giving them plausible and interesting reasons to go Highlander on Pye. Horowitz is also good at leading you into assuming you know some upcoming plot twists, only to have it be something else entirely--and I got caught once or twice by it. He does a good job of keeping the mystery complex yet clear. However, there is one huge issue with the book.

The last chapter is missing.

You see, Magpie Murders is also the most recent mystery novel by the eccentric Alan Conway. His agent Susan Ryeland is annoyed at the seeming mistake when she receives the first draft, but that annoyance turns to horror when Conway turns up dead, an apparent suicide. “Apparent” being the key word here, as Conway’s sister thinks that things don’t add up. And before long, she’s convinced Susan as well. But was does the missing chapter of Magpie Murders have to do with it?

Yes, there are two fully-fledged mystery novels in this book, and they’re both pretty good. Susan’s narrative is a little simpler than the Magpie narrative, and I’m not sure if that was intentional on Horowitz’s part or not. The tone is certainly different; the Magpie narrative is more late Golden Age with some more angst than might be expected (with Pund’s terminal illness), but not to the extent you might find in more modern works. The Susan narrative is more “modern” in tone, with Susan struggling personally (with her relationship issues) and as a detective (as no one believes that Conway was murdered and she has no obvious reason for investigating. There’s even a chapter which more or less consists of a police officer angrily complaining about mystery cliches like “the suicide is actually a murder.”) I found some of the Susan narrative to drag a bit because of that, but it was nothing severe. However, both narratives show a love of classic mysteries and both contain some very Christie-style cluing.

The Magpie narrative presents a more satisfying mystery, one with clues and plot twists and some good reveals. There is one part where you have to assume that something exists when you don’t know what it actually contains, but I feel that you can reasonably assume that this exists even if the content is more of a reasoned guess than an actual deduction. That being said, there are also some very good and subtle clues involved that can let you piece together the backstory behind the murder, and the identity of the killer themselves.

The Susan side of the narrative is a little simpler, but once again the clues are there, including a clever one that Horowitz waves in your face, totally convinced that you won’t get it. I didn’t, anyway. I don’t like how Susan solves the whole thing through more or less dumb luck, but again, the clues are there for you to notice and solve it before her. I will say that the suspects feel less developed than they do in the Magpie narrative, with the dead man standing out the most. Again, this is more due to the first-person narrative giving you less chances to get into the characters' heads, but it stood out to me. There was also a poor red herring thrown in that not only doesn’t do a good job of misdirecting, but feels poorly motivated in-story. You can argue that it was justified based on what the person involved knew (which I thought Horowitz was going for when I re-read the explanation), but it still rings a little false to me. However, this narrative also contains a certain clue that not only fits that favorite Christie clue of the overheard or misunderstood conversation, but also resolves it smartly with total fairness. This part of the story also has some interesting things to say about the creative process and how authors react to their creations, which I found interesting.

All in all, I really, really liked this book. I admit that perhaps I was just going into it with lowered expectations since it was a modern mystery, but I enjoyed seeing how everything played out. I somewhat wish that more had been done with the mixing of the two narratives, but in the end you have two well-done mystery novels for the price of one. It sold me on the rest of Horowitz’s mystery stuff, personally. Highly Recommended.

NOTE: Apparently there is version of the book, I'm assuming the hardcover, that contains an "interview" between Horowitz and Conway. I assume this since I've seen it mentioned, but it's not in my paperback copy.