The Word Is Murder
A Novel
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4.1 • 689 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"One of the most entertaining mysteries of the year. It’s also one of the most stimulating, as it ponders such questions as: Which is of greater interest to the reader, the crime or the detective? And: Is the pencil truly mightier than the butcher knife?” — Wall Street Journal
New York Times bestselling author of Magpie Murders and Moriarty, Anthony Horowitz has yet again brilliantly reinvented the classic crime novel, this time writing a fictional version of himself as the Watson to a modern-day Holmes.
A woman crosses a London street. It is just after 11 a.m. on a bright spring morning, and she is going into a funeral parlor to plan her own service. Six hours later the woman is dead, strangled with a crimson curtain cord in her own home.
Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric man as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. And Hawthorne has a partner, the celebrated novelist Anthony Horowitz, curious about the case and looking for new material. As brusque, impatient, and annoying as Hawthorne can be, Horowitz—a seasoned hand when it comes to crime stories—suspects the detective may be on to something, and is irresistibly drawn into the mystery.
But as the case unfolds, Horowitz realizes that he’s at the center of a story he can’t control, and his brilliant partner may be hiding dark and mysterious secrets of his own.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Several years ago, renowned British writer Anthony Horowitz published the first new Sherlock Holmes novels sanctioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate. The Word Is Murder is a delightfully post-modern follow-up, in which a contemporary super-sleuth looking for his own Watson chooses novelist Anthony Horowitz for the job. The whodunit is tightly crafted and challenging, but mostly we loved the book's witty structure, which immerses us in a mystery author’s writing process while still delivering a suspenseful adventure. Plus, Horowitz’s detective, Daniel Hawthorne, is as willful, frustrating, and oddly endearing as Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This spectacular series launch from bestseller Horowitz (Magpie Murders), a scrupulously fair whodunit, features a fictionalized version of himself. The author's doppelg nger who, like his creator, has written a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The House of Silk, and a Tintin movie script for Steven Spielberg is approached by Daniel Hawthorne, a former detective inspector who once consulted on one of his TV series. Hawthorne wants Horowitz to turn his "real-life" cases into books, and eventually gets him to agree. Their first joint investigative venture concerns the strangulation of Diana Cowper in her London home, mere hours after she visited a funeral parlor and made detailed arrangements for her own funeral. (In one amusing metafictional scene, Hawthorne criticizes Horowitz for inaccuracies in chapter one, an omniscient third-person account of the funeral home visit.) An interrupted text Diana sent to her son shortly before her death leads the duo to look into a long-ago hit-and-run tragedy that claimed one twin child's life and seriously injured the other. Deduction and wit are well-balanced, and fans of Peter Lovesey and other modern channelers of the spirit of the golden age of detection will clamor for more.
Customer Reviews
See AllFun read
All tied up in the end in a way that’s both sensible and fair.
The Word Is…
This is a great read. The characters are authentic, the story, intriguing and the plot, devised with the fine threads of deception, marvelous. Total winner!
Loved!
Completely immersed in Hawthorne & Horowitz’s world!