Horowitz & Hawthorne
Anthony Horowitz is a bestselling author, who has written two Bond thrillers, Trigger Mortis and Forever And A Day, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The House Of Silk, his own very popular Alex Rider series for young adults among other novels, TV series and films. He worked himself into the book, The Word Is Murder, when he reluctantly undertakes to write a crime book featuring, a former (he was fired for attacking a paedophile) police detective Daniel Hawthorne, who has been consultant on a TV series written by Horowitz.
Horowitz does not quite like Hawthorne, who has the uncanny ability to read his mind (and annoyingly calls him Tony), but does not share too many details about his own life. The two are thrown together again in the aptly titled, The Sentence Is Death, into which the detective makes a grand entry right into a complicated scene of the TV serial that is being shot on a London street.
When a celebrity divorce lawyer Richard Pryce is found dead in his home, his head bashed with an expensive bottle of wine (he is a teetotaler), Hawthorne is summoned to investigate in his new role as a consultant to the police on ‘sticky’ cases, and he strings along Horowitz to write the second book based on this case.
The lawyer obviously had many enemies but the main suspect is Akira Anno an unpleasant writer of pretentious books, who had poured wine on Pryce’s head in a restaurant and threatened to kill him with the bottle, because she felt he got her a raw deal in her divorce from real estate millionaire, Adrian Lockwood.
As the enigmatic Hawthorne, with a curious-but-resentful Horowitz as his sidekick, start investigating, the list of suspects grows. To make it worse for the writer, he is attacked by the nasty cop Cara Grumshaw, who does not want Hawthorne to get credit for solving the case.
In the last book, Horowitz was astonished to discover that Hawthorne has a hobby making model planes, in this one he is even more surprised that the lone-wolf kind of cop is also a member of a book club. The writer is forced to address one of the sessions, in the home of genial Bengali lady and her computer wiz son—the ex-cop’s secret helper.
The novel is cleverly plotted, with large doses of humour and an enigmatic detective who knows more than he is willing to let on, even to his ‘biographer.’ In the book, Horowitz reveals that he signed a three-bookdeal for the Hawthorne-led crime stories and often regrets it; but readers would be pleased if there were more books with this writer-cop partnership.
