I do love a good mystery. And I’ve been a fan of Anthony Horowitz, sometimes without even realizing it, for years. I’ve enjoyed his television series — New Blood, Midsomer Murders, and Foyles’ War. And I truly love his Sherlock Holmes pastiches: The House of Silk and Moriarty. His latest series, featuring a detective named Hawthorne, is wonderfully cheeky. Horowitz puts himself in a starring role and it works because he’s already a larger-than-life character in the real world. On the page it’s absolute magic. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic are describing these meta-mysteries as great fun. I completely agree.

The Sentence Is Death is the second book featuring Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and his trusty side-kick Tony Horowitz. Click on the excerpt below to read my full review.

Part of Horowitz’s charm is that he, like his readers, is in love with books. It’s what makes him so appealing to literary estates. Page by page he builds a solid case against the murderer, using all the conventional methods and the occasional well-worn trope of the genre. His suspects are a well-drawn, motley bunch. The chapters are filled with reams of dialogue. There’s a bumbling, but conscientious, police detective in the first book who is replaced by a pair of equally bumbling, but this time openly hostile, police detectives in the second. Expect a barrel of red herrings and lots of corpses. Fans of Midsomer Murders will know that there’s never just one death. In fact, it’s often the cover-up murder that provides the clue that cracks the case.