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The Word is Murder
Anthony Horowitz
2017
3/5 stars
A woman plans her funeral in the morning, and is murdered that evening. Daniel Hawthorne, ex-cop and current private investigator, is working with the police to solve the mystery. He approaches the author, Anthony Horowitz, to write a true-crime book about the case. Horowitz agrees, and follows Hawthorne about as he works, being a Watson to his Holmes, and trying to find the answer himself.
The premise is unique and promising, but the result was not satisfying. The mystery itself was interesting, but never compelling. There were several nicely done false leads, but equally as many quickly-obvious "secrets". The solution was not fully convincing and the murderer's confession scene was truly ridiculous.
The prose is a generally good, and Horowitz mixes his real life with fiction quite well, but after a few chapters, the novelty wore off and the story felt pretentious and too aware of it's cleverness. He spent a good many words on describing his writing process and his personal life -- words that would have been better spent on fleshing out characters and giving more clues pointing to the guilty party. I wavered between two and three stars, but decided that, as I did read it to the end, it deserves three stars, but certainly no recommendation.
