The Word Is Murder

The Writer Investigates

A woman goes to an undertaker’s office to make arrangements for her own funeral. A few hours later she is found murdered in her home.

From this intriguing beginning, Anthony Horowitz constructs a gripping novlel--The Word Is Murder-- in which he plays a starring part. Horowitz is a bestselling author, who has written a Bond thriller,Trigger Mortis, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The House Of Silk, his own very popular Alex Rider series for young adults among other novels, TV series and films. But, as his previous novel The Magpie Murders proved, he is adept at spinning complex suspense yarns with devilishly clever twists, and a tough-to-guess killer, even when he is staring the reader right in the face.

Disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, who has been consultant on a TV series written by Horowitz, now works as a consultant with the Metropolitan police. He is assigned the job of investigating the murder of Diana Cowper, the woman who planned her own funeral, down to the casket and music. Hawthorne is strapped for cash and approaches Horowitz to write a book about him working on the Cowper murder. He cheekily suggests a 50/50 split, which, of course, does not extend to his splitting bills for travel and meals.

The first problem for Horowitz is that Hawthorne is not in the least likeable, the second is that the book will work only if Hawthorne manages to solve the case. So, over the next few days, the writer follows the cop around like a sidekick and finds his life completely taken over. Hawthorne even disrupts—in a hilarious scene-- a crucial work meeting Horowitz is having with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.

The dead woman’s son Damien, a successful star working in Hollywood, arrives with girlfriend and daughter in tow. He is, from all accounts, as ruthlessly ambitious as he is handsome. His mother may have had some enemies, like a theatre producer who conned her, the parents of a boy who was killed in an accident by Diana Cowper, and his twin brother severely maimed. 

Hawthorne is annoyingly rude, bigoted and invasive, but also a brilliant investigator; Horowitz who is proud of his own analytical skills is often left gobsmacked by the cop’s sharp mind.

The book is not just suspenseful but also witty, and gives a lot of insights into the world of creative people—success, failure, struggle, ambition, envy, despair. Who the killer turns out to be is not surprising, it’s the why and how that is truly enthralling.

The Word Is Murder

By Anthony Horowitz

Publisher: Cornerstone

Pages: 400