As before, this novel reads like autobiography. Horowitz himself is a key character, the Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes. Hawthorne is an ex-cop, kicked off the force because he was suspected of pushing a child-porn suspect down a flight of stairs. Yet this very disagreeable man is just too smart, too good at solving unsolvable murders to ignore. So he gets hired to help with difficult cases. He then drafts a reluctant Horowitz, a noted writer of mysteries that include some featuring Sherlock Holmes, to write about his brilliant deductions.
This time the case involves a divorce attorney killed with a bottle of wine after the wife of a man he had defended in a divorce case had apparently threatened to hit him over the head with a bottle of wine. Of course, open-and-shut cases are not so open and shut in mystery novels, and before long there are several other possible suspects and a number of other possible motives.
Horowitz keeps things hopping, maintaining the mystery until the end without overcomplicating things. Not every mystery writer can do this this well. Yet perhaps his greatest achievement is fitting this fictional story so seamlessly into his own life.
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