The Sentence is Death, Anthony Horowitz

2nd in the Hawthorne & Horowitz story, THE SENTENCE IS DEATH continues the author's insertion of themselves into a fictional detective story, featuring the investigative skill of PI Daniel Hawthorne and Horowitz's sometimes less successful conclusion drawing.

If you're new to this series, and the concept, then it would be well worth going back to the opening salvo, THE WORD IS MURDER. That should help with the background, even if a tendency for "What the" / "Why the" moments continue. Best not to reason why and just press on is my motto, because even with this whole thing being profoundly meta, it works if you surpress the urge to make sense of the central conceit.

Just to make the whole thing even more unexpected, Horowitz, whilst ably assisting (? getting in the road of Hawthorne's investigating) he's also working on live filming of the TV series FOYLE'S WAR at the same time. Like I said, just go with it...

Hawthorne is an ex-cop (isn't everyone), who is often called in as a consultant when the police are baffled by a case. In this outing, successful celebrity divorce lawyer Richard Price has been blugeoned to death with a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine in his bachelor pad. Which is a bit odd as he's husband is part of the investigation, and Richard doesn't drink. Then there's the three digit number painted on the wall by the killer. Right from the out this is obviously going to be a tricky case to solve - lawyers / lots of potential enemies / and a past death of a close friend that could very well have something to do with all of this - only what and how or who is far from clear.

So unclear that whilst Hawthorne and Horowitz are diligently following the leads, it starts to look very like Hawthorne's got a bit that he's hiding about his own life, and Horowitz finds himself left to draw some very dramatic, and eventually utterly wrong, conclusions about the case in his own right.

Which, to be fair, is a bit of a pattern it seems. Horowitz does a good line in leaping to conclusions in the two novels in this series so far, with Hawthorne doggedly following the evidence and understanding implications a little more clearly than the slightly erratic author. Which is part of the shtick after all, and enormous fun when listened to in audio format, as the author himself explains, eventually, what he missed and how.

The whole concept of this series works, particularly if you aren't thinking too hard about it. Which is easy to do as the story progresses here. The audio reading style is laid back and unfrilled, meaning these are really easy to listen to, and to follow along with. The plots are pretty twisty and there's quite a bit of tooing and froing here between witnesses in the past (there's a sub-thread about the death of an old friend of Pryce's in a cave exploring accident many years before) so Hawthorne and Horowitz (okay well mostly Hawthorne) has a chance to explain the dreadful accident, and the brutal death. 

It's a fun series, and highly recommended in audio form.