A Line to Kill: a locked room mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling author (Hawthorne and Horowitz, 3)

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It is undeniably beautiful and picturesque – and for the purposes of this novel unspoiled by almost any crime having never had a murder case. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

Very soon they discover that not all is as it should be. Alderney is in turmoil over a planned power line that will cut through it, desecrating a war cemetery and turning neighbour against neighbour. There was no danger that the book would come out like an ego trip, says Horowitz. “At the end of the day, I’m only the narrator, not the main character. You do not learn a great deal about me in the book. The book is about Hawthorne, and me writing about Hawthorne. What it does allow me to do as a writer, is to write about the nature of a whodunit.”The sequence at the end of Live and Let Die (1954) when Bond is dragged over the coral reef is brilliant, says Horowitz.

A Line to Kill,” Anthony Horowitz’s third murder mystery pairing a stand-in for himself (a veteran English novelist and screenwriter) with ex-police detective Daniel Hawthorne, takes place mostly at a literary festival on tiny Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. “There’s never been a murder on Alderney,” more than one resident tells Hawthorne and Horowitz. But that’s about to change.

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. I was invited to Alderney in the Channel Islands three years ago to a literary festival. I loved the island. It is tiny, three miles long, and a peculiar place with all these caves, tunnels, wonderful little beaches and slightly old-fashioned-looking blue telephone boxes. The moment I arrived, I thought, wow, this is a perfect setting for a murder mystery.” For the love of letters

Realising all these permutations had been done, Horowitz began to wonder what would make his series different. When I recognised the Christie-style set-up, I immediately wondered if this was a step too far for Horowitz. The Susan Ryeland series is already an ingenious and compelling homage to the world’s most successful author of fiction and I wondered if A Line to Kill would blur the boundaries between the two series. It does not and each in is, in its own unique way, providing contemporary crime fiction with a much-needed revitalisation. The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids.A Line to Kill was a very clever, suspenseful and compelling murder mystery that I thoroughly enjoyed ' This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by The novel brings together a small cast of writers with their own secrets and histories, including a blind psychic, an unhealthy chef, a children’s author, a local war historian and a French performance poet. A somewhat eclectic mix and Horowitz places this motley crew in an isolated location which is itself riven with political tension as a plan to run an electrical power line through the island to connect France and England. The sponsor of the festival – spinthewheel.com, an online casino – is owned by Charles le Mesurier one of whose employees is one Derek Abbott, the alleged paedophile who Hawthorne allegedly threw down a flight of stairs, an action which led to his leaving the police. On the television front Horowitz says, Magpie Murders has been adapted into a six-episode series with Lesley Manville as the editor Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan as Atticus Pünd, the detective in the book within the book. The Full Monty director, Peter Cattaneo, helms the show. The snippets of life in the publishing world, even if the meeting at the “surprisingly shabby and unattractive” offices of Penguin Random House didn’t have the glamour of the meeting with Spielberg in an earlier novel! I did love Horowitz’ own puzzlement – which mirrored my own – at the possibility of coming up with a series of titles combining grammar and death! What might be next? The Verb Is Finite? The Modifier Is Dangling?