The Sentence Is Death

Meta-mystery! In The Word Is Murder, a June 2018 LibraryReads pick, private investigator Daniel Hawthorne got help from a novelist named Anthony Horowitz. Now they're tracking down a killer who clobbered big-time celebrity divorce lawyer Richard Pryce with a bottle of 1982 Chateau Lafite worth £3,000, but our novelist narrator suspects that Hawthorne has secrets of his own. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

March 15, 2019
Fired Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne bursts onto the scene of his unwilling collaborator and amanuensis, screenwriter/novelist Anthony, who seems to share all Horowitz's (Forever and a Day, 2018, etc.) credentials, to tell him that the game's afoot again.The victim whose death requires Hawthorne's attention this time is divorce attorney Richard Pryce, bashed to death in the comfort of his home with a wine bottle. The pricey vintage was a gift from Pryce's client, well-to-do property developer Adrian Lockwood, on the occasion of his divorce from noted author Akira Anno, who reportedly celebrated in a restaurant only a few days ago by pouring a glass of wine over the head of her husband's lawyer. Clearly she's too good a suspect to be true, and she's soon dislodged from the top spot by the news that Gregory Taylor, who'd long ago survived a cave-exploring accident together with Pryce that left their schoolmate Charles Richardson dead, has been struck and killed by a train at King's Cross Station. What's the significance of the number "182" painted on the crime scene's wall and of the words ("What are you doing here? It's a bit late") with which Pryce greeted his murderer? The frustrated narrator (The Word Is Murder, 2018) can barely muster the energy to reflect on these clues because he's so preoccupied with fending off the rudeness of Hawthorne, who pulls a long face if his sidekick says boo to the suspects they interview, and the more-than-rudeness of the Met's DI Cara Grunshaw, who threatens Hawthorne with grievous bodily harm if he doesn't pass on every scrap of intelligence he digs up. Readers are warned that the narrator's fondest hope--"I like to be in control of my books"--will be trampled and that the Sherlock-ian solution he laboriously works out is only the first of many.Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the field has anywhere near this much ingenuity to burn.

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Starred review from March 25, 2019
Bestseller Horowitz’s doppelganger, also named Anthony Horowitz, once again plays Dr. Watson to PI Daniel Hawthorne’s Sherlock Holmes in the British author’s superb sequel to 2018’s The Word Is Murder. This time the astute, if irritating, detective ropes Tony into helping him investigate the murder of high-powered London divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, who was struck on the head with a bottle of expensive wine in his home. The obvious suspect is prickly poet and novelist Akira Anno, who threatened to hit Pryce with a wine bottle in a restaurant where they ran into each other days before the murder. Pryce was representing Akira’s husband in a divorce settlement in which she felt she was getting a raw deal. Other suspects emerge in the complicated case, which may have its roots in a caving expedition that Pryce and two close friends took 10 years before in Yorkshire; one of those friends died while trapped in a cave during a rainstorm. Leavening the grim story line are deliciously comic scenes in which Tony typically makes a wrong deduction or suffers a personal slight (Akira disdains him because he writes popular fiction). Horowitz plays fair with the reader all the way to the surprise reveal of the killer’s identity. Fans of traditional puzzle mysteries will be enthralled. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

Starred review from April 1, 2019
Horowitz succeeds on all levels with book two in the Detective Daniel Hawthorne series. As in The Word Is Murder (2018), Horowitz inserts himself into the plot as a fictional (yet very real) version of himself, playing Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes, once again irresistibly drawn into a mystery. Suspects are hardly in short supply in this case of murder-by-wine-bottle: Richard Pryce, a lawyer specializing in celebrity divorces, has been bonked on the head with a 1982 Ch�teau Lafite worth �3,000. The police enlist the aid of PI Hawthorne, who quickly summons Horowitz to help. (The latter is in the middle of filming a Foyle's War episode, adding another meta element to the plot, which will delight Horowitz's fans.) Hawthorne continues to try the author's and the reader's patience with outlandish behavior, but there are hints this time that he has gone to extreme lengths to conceal an unfortunate past, making him a somewhat more sympathetic character than in the earlier tale. Readers will enjoy Horowitz's insights into the publishing world and rack their brains deciding which stories are true and which are fictional. Literary references abound within the text, too, including a three-digit number scrawled on a wall, nodding to Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, along with other Doyle and Christie references. Despite these allusions and the Holmesian frame story, the overall voice of the series is fresh and original, Horowitz writing with the effortless �lan that distinguishes all of his work.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Horowitz has the Midas touch, whether he is creating television series, writing children's books, or reinventing iconic crime-fiction characters, including those of Christie, Fleming, and Doyle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)