Anthony Horowitz - The Twist Of A Knife

 

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Entertaining stuff

I have enjoyed the Hawthorne And Horowitz series and this fourth book, The Twist Of A Knife is a good, entertaining addition. It works fine as a stand-alone, but there’s probably more enjoyment of the characters to be had if you’ve read the series from the start.

This time, Anthony has a play opening in the West End, but after the First Night party there is a murder and a vengeful Inspector Cara Grunshaw builds a seemingly solid case against Anthony. He and Hawthorne have just a couple of days to discover the real culprit, and Hawthorne is his usual enigmatic and apparently unsympathetic self…

The clues are fairly laid, but you do need to be a very keen-eyed detective to spot them (I didn’t, for the most part), and Hawthorne’s uncommunicative style leaves us guessing for a long time as the threat mounts. It’s an enjoyable, Christie-like mystery; well written of course, nicely structured and quite involving. The rather hapless persona that Horowitz has created for himself in these books is an engaging and sometimes amusing narrator. (This early little exchange made me laugh, for example when Hawthorne tries to be encouraging about one of Anthony’s plays:

“The Daily Mail said it was splendidly entertaining”

“I don’t read reviews – and that was the Express.”)

It’s worth saying, perhaps, that there is a curious little episode at one point where Anthony and another character have a discussion/argument about cultural appropriation. It’s an important topic and Horowitz plainly wants to air his view, which is fair enough and with which I have a lot of sympathy – but it doesn’t fit well into this book and slightly jarred on me.

That said, it’s otherwise good, clean fun. We learn just a little more about Hawthorne’s background and at the end there’s a set-up for more books in the series, which I shall be reading as they appear. Recommended.