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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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Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival's other guests--an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children's author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian--along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line.

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. When a body turns up the next morning, another murder investigation gets underway with Hawthorne helping the local constabulary. Unlike the first two books in the series, this one is confined to a set location with a cast of characters we meet in the opening chapters. In that sense, it’s not unlike a classic Agatha Christie murder mystery. Anyone of 15 people had the motive to do the killing. The question is who.

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The visiting authors - including a blind medium, a French performance poet and a celebrity chef - seem to be harbouring any number of unpleasant secrets. Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt each summer. The three children are terrified, yet fascinated, by their neighbor, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb are hesitant to talk about Boo, and many of them have not seen him for many years. The children feed one another's imagination with rumors about his appearance and reasons for remaining hidden, and they fantasize about how to get him out of his house. After two summers of friendship with Dill, Scout and Jem find that someone is leaving them small gifts in a tree outside the Radley place. Several times the mysterious Boo makes gestures of affection to the children, but, to their disappointment, he never appears in person.

Krebs, Albin. "Truman Capote Is Dead at 59; Novelist of Style and Clarity", The New York Times, August 26, 1984, p.1. The book is filled with a dry humor. Horowitz pokes fun at the book industry, the police and human nature in general. The ending was perfect, everyone’s identity was not as it seemed. I would never have guessed the final denouement. As usual Hawthorne’s usual intuitive skills are fine tuned as he continued to banter Horowitz who often appears clueless. It makes for the often funny interactions between them.This time around the odd couple ends up on a small island as part of a literary festival to promote their first book. The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids. This book is a pure pleasure to read and enjoy and Jan and I took part in both the enjoyment and the pleasure of a well done whodunnit. That Horowitz is out manipulated, out maneuvered, and outshone by his own creation is a running joke. Horowitz also sets his sights on other tropes of the modern writer: publishers, agents, editors, literary festivals. He is an insider's insider. More importantly, he manages to make the reader care for Hawthorne, who is neither cuddly nor entirely admirable, but seems to live by his own code--a code which neither Horowitz nor the reader to this point have entirely apprehended. Anthony Horowitz and the subject of his book The Word is Murder, Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne, are invited to a literary festival on the Channel Island of Alderney, in preparation for their upcoming follow-up, The Sentence is Death. But what the pair don’t expect to find is an island divided by conflict and become embroiled in a nefarious country house homicide…

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