A review by leahthebooklover
The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

4.0

I chose this book because it was "pressed" upon me by a podcast I recently started listening to called "Currently Reading" (great podcast, but it's seriously adding to the length of my tbr pile). The premise intrigued me. Anthony Horowitz is a prolific author and screenwriter, and in this book (the first of a series of at least 10 intended books, 4 of which have been published to date) he himself is a major character. He is approached by an enigmatic and unlikeable detective named Daniel Hawthorne who is a police consultant and is working on a uniquely puzzling murder. A middle aged woman goes to a funeral home to make her own funeral arrangements. Six hours later she is strangled to death in her own apartment. Her body isn't discovered until two days later when the housekeeper arrives for work. Hawthorne is called in to consult, and it's at this point, before much actual investigation has begun, that he approaches Horowitz with an unusual proposal. He wants Horowitz to accompany him as he investigates, and then write a book based on the case. The book blurs the line between fact and fiction. The facts about Horowitz himself that are inserted in the book are true enough - the previous books he has written and so on - but the case itself, the character of Hawthorne and the rest of the victims, suspects, and events described, are all fictional. Hawthorne has been described as a "modern day Sherlock Holmes" while Horowitz is his Watson counterpart. It's a bit of a stretch, but not totally unrealistic, especially considering that in real life, Horowitz has been authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate to write new Sherlock Holmes mysteries (see "House of Silk" and "Moriarty"). In creating the genre blending Daniel Hawthorne series, Horowitz is proving again what a versatile writer he is. For sensitive readers, this is a murder mystery, so there are some graphic descriptions of death. Also, the character of Hawthorne (who I previously described as unlikeable) is shown to be prominently homophobic. Horowitz addresses his objection to this aspect of Hawthorne's personality, even going so far as wondering if he can continue working with him, but by that time he's so invested in trying to "one-up" Hawthorne and solve the case himself that he continues on (of course he does, or else there wouldn't be a book). The matter is not addressed again in this book, perhaps it will be dealt with in later books in the series. I certainly hope so, because otherwise I find it's inclusion to be pointless and offensive. Part memoir, part murder mystery, written like a true crime story, this is a series with a few problems and a fair amount of promise. I'm going to give the next book in the series ("The Sentence is Death") a try fairly soon.
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