It always amazes me when I run across yet another prolific mystery writer that I’ve never heard of. Anthony Horowitz is one such person, a British novelist and screenplay writer. He has a 14-book series about a teenage spy named Alex Rider, but that’s not the one I just finished. He has written about 50 novels in total. I saw a recommendation in the New York Times Book Review for his 6-books called the Hawthorne & Horowitz series. These are detective novels in which he writes himself into the story. It is the authors intention to create a series in which he becomes the best friend of a great detective like Sherlock Holmes and his buddy, Dr. Watson. The detective in Horotwitz's story is Daniel Hawthorne.
The first book, The Word is Murder, is available in audiobook format, so I jumped on that. The books are Narrated by Rory Kinnear, and he is an exceptional interpreter and creator of the multiple figures about whom Horowitz writes. In this story, the characters get to know each other, but they hardly achieve anything close to friendship until the very end of the novel. The story takes place around the horrible car accident in which one of two young brothers is killed, and the other is left permanently damaged, requiring lifelong care. Even though the woman, Diana Cowper, who was driving the car that struck the boys fled the scene of the accident, she was only given a sentence, the equivalent of only a slap of the wrist. It was 10 years later that Horowitz & Hawthorne enter the scene of the death of the woman who had struck the boys. She had expected to die in the immediate future. The reader meets her as she enters the funeral home owned by funeral director Robert Cornwallis where Diana announced her detailed plans for her own funeral. Meanwhile, although Hawthorne will reveal nearly nothing about himself to Horowitz, it is Hawthorne who challenges Horowitz to write a novel about his detective wizardry.
As with all great writers, I did not see the end coming until the very end. This book is filled with rich characters and a fascinating main plot and multiple subplots. While I loved the audiobook, surely this would be a wonderful read. I’ve already downloaded the second book, The Sentence is Death.
Well, your last sentence answered my question :-) If you like the second book, I might have to check out the series.
ReplyDeleteI've heard of Alex Rider series, but for some reason always assumed it was young adult because of the protagonist's age.