A hifalutin lawyer is murdered by wine bottle in his swanky London house - whodunit? Special consultant to the police, Daniel Hawthorne, teams up once again with his hapless modern-day Watson, Anthony Horowitz, to find out.
Like the first novel, The Word is Murder, the second Hawthorne/Horowitz novel, The Sentence is Death, is just ok. A lot of my peeves are similar to the first book: the premise is unremarkable (another murder in someone’s home), I’m not that taken with the London setting, and the story takes a while to get going so that first half is a bit of a patient slog. The cast too are a mostly unlikeable bunch including a snooty literary writer, a wealthy real estate mogul, and grumpy cops.
That said, Hawthorne and Horowitz have great chemistry and their interactions are always entertaining. I loved the very twisty final act with Horowitz giving the reader multiple fake endings, first with his (wrong) explanation of the crime, then the other character’s, before the real solution is revealed. Though the finale does seem to (comically) mirror one aspect of the first book’s silly ending, it does improve upon it by not having the killer monologue their motivations like a dumb Bond villain but rather has Hawthorne explain it all after the fact in a much more natural way.
Still, it’s weird how Hawthorne was once again brought in immediately to look into what doesn’t appear to be that strange a crime, particularly as he’s not an official detective and the London Met has their own detectives working the case alongside him - why wouldn’t they rely on their own detectives? Maybe give them a chance at solving the case before bringing in outside consultants right off the bat? It’s a case of the fictional conceit making it hard to suspend disbelief.
The autobiographical snippets about Foyle’s War (the WW2 TV show Horowitz writes and his wife produces) were interesting, though I’ve never seen the show, and the book club scene where Horowitz sits in on a Holmes discussion, having recently written an official Holmes novel himself, The House of Silk, was fun.
I really liked the numerous dead-ends Horowitz worked in to keep the reader guessing right to the very end, ie. what Akira Anno was hiding, whether Gregory Taylor’s death was a suicide or not. And the writing throughout is solid as ever - like Horowitz’s other books, this one’s a very accessible and pleasant read.
The Sentence is Death is not that memorable a mystery and I found it easy to put down, but it’s also cleverly-constructed and written, with enough going on to recommend it. If you’re gonna read just one Hawthorne/Horowitz novel, I recommend the third book, A Line to Kill, but if you’re a fan and going to read the whole series, The Sentence is Death, like The Word is Murder, won’t disappoint but might underwhelm.
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