Review: A Line to Kill (Hawthorne & Horowitz #3)
Gaby Meares
This is the third instalment of Horowitz’s series, where he plays the role of the rather hapless sidekick to his brilliant, but annoying, fictional detective Daniel Hawthorne. The other titles are The Word is Murder and The Sentence is Death. Horowitz is worried that he will soon run out of titles with grammatical allusions!
This time we find them invited to a literary festival held on a remote island and before you can say ‘Agatha Christie’, a murder is committed and everyone’s a suspect. As Horowitz complains, ‘I had come to Alderney in the hope that I would be introducing Hawthorne to my world: books, lectures and all the rest of it. But instead, I had once again been dragged into his’.
Using a writing festival as the setting gives Horowitz plenty of opportunity to wax lyrical about the shared love of literature: ‘I think there’s something wonderful and reassuring about the idea that in the rush of modern life people will still come together and sit for an hour in a theatre, a gymnasium or a giant tent simply out of a love of books and reading.’ Obviously, anyone reading his book will be in total agreement.
This is an easy book to read; a real page-turner. But Horowitz can also be insightful. As he notes: ‘there are victims in every murder story, and not just the ones who are killed’. Just like Poirot and Holmes, Hawthorne waits for the final pages before the big reveal, and the reader is left wondering ‘why didn’t I work that out?’ And that’s the reason we all enjoy a great whodunit!