A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz Narrator: Rory Kinnear
Series: Hawthorne and Horowitz #3
Published by HarperAudio on October 19, 2021
Source: Purchased
Genres: Mystery
Length: 8 hrs 50 mins
Pages: 384
Format: Audiobook
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The New York Times bestselling author of the brilliantly inventive The Word Is Murder and The Sentence Is Death returns with his third literary whodunit featuring intrepid detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz.
When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don’t expect to find themselves in the middle of murder investigation—or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past.
Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival’s other guests—an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian—along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line.
When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?
Both a brilliant satire on the world of books and writers and an immensely enjoyable locked-room mystery, A Line to Kill is a triumph—a riddle of a story full of brilliant misdirection, beautifully set-out clues, and diabolically clever denouements.
The hook here is that Horowitz has written himself into the book, a Watson figure to Hawthorne’s Sherlock. It seems a silly conceit to me. I guess it lets him mention his other work, but we all know this is a fictionalized version of Horowitz, basically a character, so I don’t see the point.
Anyway, this time around Horowitz and Hawthorne are sent to the island of Alderney for a small weekend literary festival. And of course, while they’re there, someone is killed – a wealthy sponsor of the festival, murdered at his own house party. The island is locked down, no one allowed on, no one allowed off, while the police, with Hawthorne’s help, try to figure out who the killer is. Everyone on the island seems to have a reason to want the man dead.
The house party/isolated island gives us a limited number of suspects, but everyone here has a secret and there are red herrings galore. Horowitz and Hawthorne still don’t seem to like each other and the tensions in their relationship add some humor to the story. Hawthorne’s like most fictional detectives, he allows you to see the clues but doesn’t let you in on what they mean until the end and Horowitz the character has little idea of where the solution is heading. The peeks at the book industry and writer festivals were fun too.
About Anthony Horowitz
Anthony John Horowitz, CBE (born 5 April 1955) is an English novelist and screenwriter specializing in mystery and suspense. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been turned into a hugely successful TV series by Amazon Freevee.
Anthony is also an acclaimed writer for adults and was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels The House of Silk and Moriarty. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation novels for James Bond with Trigger Mortis and Forever and Day, published in 2015 and 2018 respectively. A third novel in the series With a Mind to Kill was published in May 2022.
Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was published in October 2016 to critical acclaim and was serialised on BritBox at the beginning of 2022 with Lesley Manville in the lead role. It will be televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will begin filming in September 2023. His new series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz has four books so far: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill and the recently published The Twist of a Knife. Anthony has just started work on a fifth: Close to Death.
Horowitz has also written for television, contributing scripts to ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot and adapting six early episodes of Midsomer Murders from the novels of Caroline Graham, including the first three episodes. He was the creator and writer of the ITV series Foyle’s War, Collision and Injustice, and the BBC series Crime Traveller and New Blood.
In 2019 Anthony became a Patron to Home-Start in Suffolk, a small local family support charity working with families across the Suffolk county, as they navigate through challenging circumstances such as mental health issues, bereavement, long term or terminal illness, isolation, domestic abuse, poverty and so much more.