finished reading

The third installment in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series starts off without a murder. Instead, there’s a slow build of tension-literal and narrative-between the main characters, author Anthony "Tony" Horowitz and ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne, as they reluctantly embark on a speaking engagement at a literary festival on Alderney.

When the murder finally occurs, there’s a long line (a clever play on the book's title) of suspects because the victim is so thoroughly unlikable. Also speaking at the festival are a celebrity chef who is full of himself, a children’s author making a deal with Disney, a French performance poet, a blind psychic, and a local war historian. Each of these characters, along with their entourage, is fully fleshed out and in some way tied to the victim.

As always, the real fun of this series is Tony’s endless fascination with Hawthorne, even when they don't seem to like each other.

From the publisher:

The New York Times bestselling author of the brilliantly inventive The Word Is Murder and The Sentence Is Death returns with his third literary whodunit featuring intrepid detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz.

When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don’t expect to find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation—or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past.

Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival’s other guests—an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian—along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line.

When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?

Both a brilliant satire on the world of books and writers and an immensely enjoyable locked-room mystery, A Line to Kill is a triumph—a riddle of a story full of brilliant misdirection, beautifully set-out clues, and diabolically clever denouements.