Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* 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 Château 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 élan 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. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews
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. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Meta-mystery! In
Publishers Weekly Reviews
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