Like true crime

Making fiction sound like fact is the goal of most novelists, but few writers succeed in this objective better than Anthony Horowitz in The Word Is Murder (2018). The story seems so real that readers will be tempted to double-check the cover to make sure it really does say "a novel."

This is because Horowitz makes himself the narrator and a major character, and he goes into some detail about his career as a novelist (The House of Silk) and as the writer of the Alex Rider books for children and Foyle's War, shown on BBC and PBS. He even makes characters out of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson when he has a conference with them about a movie script he has been working on. The line between truth and story becomes something of a blur.

A former police detective named Daniel Hawthorne comes to Horowitz with a proposition. He asks Horowitz to write a true-crime book about a murder he is investigating as a police consultant. He wants Horowitz to be the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes, in other words.

Hawthorne was fired for reasons he declines to explain, but because of his exceptional skill he is hired whenever a difficult case comes along. Such a case is the murder of Diana Cowper just hours after she had made her own funeral arrangements. Horowitz doesn't like the idea of writing a true crime book and sharing royalties with someone else, and he likes Hawthorne even less, yet the case sounds too intriguing to pass up.

Ten years previously Diana Cowper had been the driver in a hit-and-run accident in which one boy was killed and his brother permanently disabled. Does her murder have something to do with this? Or is it somehow related to her son, Damian Cowper, a major Hollywood star? Like the cops, conducting their own investigation, Horowitz has his own theories about the murder, and like the cops he is always wrong.

Horowitz has written novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, and now he gives Hawthorne Holmes-like abilities. Mystery lovers will enjoy this tale, and they will be happy to know Hawthorne returns in The Sentence Is Death.