Just One Reader's Opinion!

The Word Is Murder

The Word Is MurderThe Word Is Murder By Anthony Horowitz

Series: Hawthorne & Horowitz #1

Source Received from the publisher

Published by Harper on August 24, 2017

Received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.


Rating: four-stars

One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor - enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service.

Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz.

Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.

A masterful and tricky mystery that springs many surprises, The Word is Murder is Anthony Horowitz at his very best.

I discovered that I had an e-ARC of this while browsing my Kindle one evening, and I found the concept of the author inserting himself as a Watson-esque narrator too intriguing to pass up.

I wound up enjoying this book so much that I immediately bought the rest of the books in the series and read them all one right after the other! This was a nice break from the darker, heavier mysteries I’d been reading, and I loved the dynamic between Horowitz and the prickly, secretive Hawthorne. Horowitz sort of reluctantly agrees to work with him, and their relationship is the highlight of the book.

The mystery itself was a good one (a woman is found murdered hours after making her own funeral arrangements), and I loved the author himself as a character in the story! This felt fun and inventive, and as soon as I finished reading, I moved on to book two.

four-stars

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