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

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Except for the atrocities of World War II, there hasn’t been a murder on the Channel Island of Alderney from time immemorial. The staging of the Alderney Lit Fest brings that streak to a decided end. It's a tiny island, just three miles long and a mile and a half wide. The perfect location for a brand new literary festival. Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne has been invited to talk about his new book. The writer, Anthony Horowitz, travels with him. And A Line to Kill– the third installment of the Hawthorne and Horowitz series – is just that: all the joy and entertainment of a Sunday night cosy detective show.

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.

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Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. 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? Realising all these permutations had been done, Horowitz began to wonder what would make his series different. 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.

Lesley is absolutely wonderful and Cattaneo is one of the most brilliant directors I’ve worked with.”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

A Line to Kill is set just before the publication of The Word is Murder (the first in the series) and opens with Hawthorne and Horowitz being invited to speak at a literary festival on the tiny Channel Island of Alderney. Alderney is only three square miles in size, home to about 2,000 people, and has never had a murder… until the detective duo arrives. The novel is very much an homage to Agatha Christie, particularly the later Poirot novels, and she is mentioned both explicitly and implicitly, for example in a chapter title. Following Christie, Horowitz spends nearly a third of the narrative setting the scene for the murder: a small literary festival on a tiny island establishes a limited pool of suspects in a convincing manner; tensions concerning the construction of a Normandy-Alderney-Britain power line disturb the peace of an otherwise idyllic community; and a suitably obnoxious murder victim is presented in the form of Charles le Mesurier. The series is good for 10 books, Horowitz says. “At the end of the tenth book, we find out what makes Hawthorne such a difficult and contrary human being. We find out what happened to him as a boy that changed his life.” 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.There is a running joke about titles in the novels with Hawthorne suggesting ‘Hawthorne Investigates’, and dismissing The Word is Murder as “too poncy”. “I am trying for a literary twist to the titles. The first was The Word is Murder and the second The Sentence is Death . I have painted myself into a corner because you run out of grammatical phrases for a murder story, so perhaps it was a mistake to keep trying to make some kind of allusion to writing.” My first thought was, is the detective British or from another country, man or woman? What is the ethnicity, sexuality, marital status? Does he have problems? Does she want to be something different? Is she a robot, vampire, spaceman or ghost?” From many angles On this occasion, the premise is that Horowitz has been invited to attend a literary fesitval on Alderney – the baby brother island to Guernsey and Jersey, measuring barely 5km long and 2.5 km wide, home to a shade over 2000 souls, according to Wikipedia. A Line to Kill was a very clever, suspenseful and compelling murder mystery that I thoroughly enjoyed '

The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids.Many thanks to Anthony Horowitz and Penguin Books for the chance to read this ARC, courtesy of NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. I loved this smartly written whodunit, but it's the characters of Hawthorne and Horowitz that have completely won me over.' Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. The sleuth and the scribbler are there to promote the first of their three proposed Inspector Hawthorne novels. Horowitz sums up the rest of the event’s participants: “an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet. . . . Not quite the magnificent seven.” Then there’s Charles le Mesurier, the online-gaming entrepreneur bankrolling the event, a wealthy and boorish figure who patronizes or taunts most of the men he meets and, though married, puts the moves on every pretty woman.

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