Anthony Horowitz’s play, Mindgame, opens to a crushing opening night review from famously viperous theatre critic Harriet Throsby. So when she is found stabbed to death the morning after, with a knife belonging to Horowitz, he is the prime suspect. Only one man can help him clear his name: Hawthorne!
Hawthorne and Horowitz are back with their fourth outing, The Twist of a Knife, and it’s not a bad whodunit, though it doesn’t reach the heights of their previous adventure, A Line to Kill.
The chemistry between the two remains fun, as does the fourth wall-breaking, and we learn a bit more about Hawthorne’s mysterious past. Two characters from The Sentence is Death make a return: Cara Grunshaw, the gruff copper, and Kevin Chakraborty, the tech-genius teenager with MS, though Grunshaw is as one-dimensionally evil as ever and Kevin is more of a plot device than a character.
There’s never any doubt that Tony didn’t really do it (which is a shame - I would’ve loved if this had turned into a modern day Roger Ackroyd, though it would mean an end to the series) and there’s nothing here Horowitz hasn’t done before, or better, in previous books. It does keep you guessing more or less until the end (the killer’s reveal surprisingly happens before the penultimate chapter) though the plot gets a little convoluted for all that.
The Twist of a Knife turns out to be a fairly standard whodunit in the end though it’s never dull and, while I wasn’t wow-ed by anything in the novel, I also wasn’t too bored either. It’s not as great as the previous novel but it’s about the same level of quality as most books in this series, so I expect most fans won’t be disappointed with this latest entry. And, speaking of fans, good news for us as it looks like there’s going to be quite a few more books in this series to follow!
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