A Deadly Episode

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

They're making a major feature film of the first Hawthorne/Horowitz mystery novel. Except--they're behind schedule, they've run out of money and . . . oh! The star has just been murdered.

Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne is dead.

Or, rather, the actor playing him in the film adaptation of The Word is Murder is. Rising star David Caine has been stabbed, and it seems that everyone on the set had a motive.

Caine had just fired his PA. He had fallen out with his director, slept with the screenwriter, humiliated his co-star and dropped his agent days before he was about to sign a multi-million-dollar deal to appear in the next Spider-Man movie.

But what if Caine's murderer had made a mistake? What if it was the real Hawthorne who was the intended victim? For it turns out that the brilliant detective may have got it wrong ten years earlier. An innocent man has died in jail. And perhaps someone has decided that Hawthorne must pay the price.

From the film set on the south coast of England, the story moves to Reeth, in Yorkshire, the village where Hawthorne grew up. A burned-down school, a car accident that isn't what it seems, blackmail and murder in an Elizabethan country house . . . somehow they combine to unlock the secret of what has happened in Hastings.

For once, the local police are helpful. DS Sarah Milnes gives Hawthorne carte blanche to investigate and there may even be a hint of romance in the air. Which leaves his hapless sidekick, Horowitz, on his own, stumbling his way to the truth.

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, A Deadly Episode is an intriguing page-turner that once again demonstrates why Anthony Horowitz is the reigning king of the modern whodunit.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Horowitz's ever-inventive Horowitz and Hawthorne series gets extra metafictional in this brilliant sixth installment (after Close to Death). In the world of the novel, Anthony Horowitz is the sidekick to master sleuth Daniel Hawthorne, and the pair's first murder case was long ago immortalized in the true crime bestseller The Word Is Murder. The action begins with the duo learning that The Word Is Murder is being adapted into a film. Horowitz is suspicious: the project is backed by a little-known production company, and screenwriter Shanika Harris is frank about her lack of interest in stories about murder and desire to depict Horowitz and Hawthorne's relationship as more tumultuous than it really is. After production gets underway, Horowitz and Hawthorne end up with a fresh homicide to investigate when David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, is stabbed to death in his trailer. Though the initial inquiry focuses on Caine's many enemies, Horowitz soon comes to suspect that the real Hawthorne was the intended target. As always, the author combines delicious dry humor with a rigorous fair-play whodunit, but this installment's Scream-like Hollywood satire takes it to another level. This series is in peak form. (Apr.)

Kirkus Book Review

Murder disrupts the filming of--what else?--The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne. With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne's been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who'd returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who's abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa's apt rejoinder, "All those questions in the script and now you're asking them for real," he responds to Horowitz's theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present--or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz's most devoted fans will celebrate. Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it's a distinctly minor work in the author's brainteasing canon. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.