Review by Booklist Review
Among his many outstanding accomplishments, Horowitz adapted Caroline Graham's mysteries into the early episodes of the long-running and internationally popular television series Midsomer Murders. Here he's created a tiny Midsomer village within Riverside Close in Richmond, a town near southwest London. The Close includes every manner of resident, including two ex-nuns and a chess celebrity, and becomes the scene of the murder of Charles Kenworthy, found dead on his porch with the bolt of a crossbow through his chest. Kenworthy was an arrogant and obnoxious man, and nothing in the peaceful complex was the same after he moved in. Each of the original residents had their own reason for wanting him dead. Daniel Hawthorne is called in by the baffled police. He is the shadowy (one might say shady) ex-policeman turned private investigator with whom the author himself has solved four earlier cases. Horowitz has perfected metafiction to the point where the reader settles in comfortably for the fifth time as the self-deprecating author engages with the prickly Hawthorne to create a crime novel based on his investigations. An absolutely engrossing tale, including a locked-room second murder, written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to anyone who can figure this one out!HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Horowitz followers and all lovers of diabolically clever mysteries are primed for the latest Hawthorne and Horowitz adventure.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the intriguing if uneven fifth installment of Horowitz's Hawthorne and Horowitz series (after The Twist of a Knife), the author again blends mystery and metafiction to examine a murder in an exclusive London cul-de-sac. After the obnoxious Giles Kenworthy is slain with a crossbow in his home among the ritzy mansions of Riverview Close, police detective Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, John Dudley, jump on the case. At first, owing to Kenworthy's lack of popularity among his neighbors, Hawthorne and Dudley float the idea that it was a collaborative killing in the tradition of Murder on the Orient Express. Then one of their key suspects dies in an apparent suicide, and the case shifts into locked-room mystery territory, with a single killer likely picking off Riverview Close peers one by one. Horowitz again inserts himself in the narrative, working with Hawthorne to turn the case into a proper novel, but he writes much of this volume in third person, turning to his own voice only occasionally to comment on genre conventions or tease the mystery's conclusion. The result is a narrative of frames within frames that gradually loses entertainment value as a fair play mystery and ultimately slips into something far more jumbled. There's plenty of ambition on display, but this isn't up to series standards. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne. Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam's chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy's wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband's dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He's been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include--and seem to be limited to--Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices. Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
