The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

 

Happy Wednesday!

Last week I promised myself I was finally going to get more organized and scheduled with my reviews and blogposts.  I was going to publish them once a week on Tuesdays!!

Yeah, well, again, happy Wednesday.  Sigh.

I will try to keep publishing on a more regular basis.  If you are receiving this review via email, thank you for subscribing, and please do visit my site to see other reviews from years past!  Click the Read More link at the bottom of the email to see all my reviews!

Now, on to this week's review:

I plucked this book out of the Goodwill pile my daughter made when she went off to college.  She graduates next month.  So yeah, it has been on my TBR for a few years now! 

The great/unique thing about this book is that the author is himself a character in the book.  He mentions real things that are happening or will happen in his actual life. This makes it a little bit difficult to figure out what is real and what is actual fiction; I may or may not have been googling his tv show work as I read!  

Otherwise, what we have here is a pretty traditional whodunnit. A woman with a famous actor for a son plans her own funeral on the same day she is murdered.  Coincidence?  They think not. Horowitz follows ex-Investigator Hawthorne around as the brilliant detective chases the clues in his nontraditional way and writes down everything Hawthorne does so that "they" can write a novel about the case.  Horowitz asks a few questions of his own, which earns him frowning disapproval from the crotchety Hawthorne.  Same result when Horowitz tries to learn a little bit about Hawthorne the man, who thinks that since that information is completely irrelevant to the murder, it is irrelevant to the book.  So we continue to plod along and follow Hawthorne, until Horowitz decides to branch out on his own with his own idea of whodunnit. 

Disaster.

There are definitely a lot of twists and turns and misdirections in the story.  It gets a bit convoluted but keeps you guessing, if you care.  I found that I didn't really care.  There was no energy to the story, no real connection to the victim(s), and it read a bit dry honestly.  I did like the originality of the author being part of the story; it was like a shock to the system to be reading along in first person and then BAM he mentions something out of real life.  So that was fun.  There are three more books in this series.  And maybe it isn't fair that I read this so close to another murder mystery series with original characters that I REALLY liked.  But for my reading life, I think I will stick with Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club series.  They are a lot more fun!!!