I’m taking my life in my hands reviewing The Twist of a Knife (2022) by Anthony Horowitz, you realise.  After all, if I don’t like it, I might end up like Harriet Throsby, the theatre critic for The Times who criticised Horowitz’s play Mindgame and ended up stabbed to death. No, wait, that was fiction…wasn’t it? That’s the plot of The Twist of a Knife. The meta-fictional element of this series, in which Horowitz teams up with ex-D.I. Daniel Hawthorne to solve a series of murders, is loads of fun, but I do catch myself spending the first quarter of each book thinking “Is that a real person? Wait, did that really happen?”. It’s a difficult act to juggle, but Horowitz has mastered it.

And so this time around it’s the murder of Harriet Throsby which concerns us, and concerns Anthony — the fictional version of Horowitz — far more personally since he finds himself accused of her murder following her savage review. As motives go it’s a little thin, but the small matter of some very compelling physical evidence makes Anthony’s guilt seem all the more likely…and so he turns to the brilliant, perceptive Hawthorne to dig him out of trouble before charges can be brought and newspapers really do start carrying headlines like “ALEX RIDER AUTHOR ON MURDER CHARGE”.

I’m slightly safer than Mrs. Throsby in that this review isn’t going to be a pan — there’s too much fun to be had in Horowitz’s playing with the trappings of the traditional mystery, as well as his own character’s predicament and delicate ego (“If there’s a book of mine in a room, it’s always the first thing I’ll see.”) — but I still came away from this a little underwhelmed in the mystery elements, feeling that, after the good work done in bombarding you with over-subtle clues what lead nowhere (and some superbly unsubtle clues that turn out to matter a great deal), the eventual solution and the deductions that lead to it lack the weight and cleverness that Horowitz has shown himself capable of writing. In a way this makes what he’s doing here the perfect updating of the Golden Age into the modern milieu, because so much of what was written in the genre’s heyday was fairly standard, but when someone shows themself capable of brilliance, there’s the tendency to want brilliance from them at every turn.

What is especially good here is the opening, laying the footings for the drama to come, and the sequence in which Anthony is processed after being arrested — showcasing Horowitz’s talent for strong, clear prose that never veers into mawkishness even as his humanity is stripped away (becoming “nothing more than an object to be processed”) — as the stark contrast of his life to that point is drawn. The prospect of arrest and conviction for murder is horrifying enough on its own, but you really feel the horror of the situation, leavened by some great touched of humour (“My children’s books would collapse. On the other hand, it might help my crime-fiction sales.”). Indeed, the humanity of the situation, never just reducing this to a simple Killer + Body = Puzzle conundrum, is one of the book’s strongest aspects.

“I really shouldn’t say this, but I think someone has done the world a favour. She won’t be missed.”

“She had a husband and a daughter,” Hawthorne reminded him.

“So did Lucrezia Borgia.”

When it eventually transpires that a mere seven suspects exist at the intersection of means, motive, and opportunity — “Hawthorne would have solved the whole thing before breakfast” — we enter into the classic period of interviews, subtle linguistic clues, and all the fun of the fair that we come to these novels for. And Horowitz clearly loves writing this sort of stuff, with slips and freely-declared moments of insight littering the pages, peppered amidst so many other interesting details that you’ll definitely pick up on some and certainly sail past most. It’s in this regard that the book is most successful, as the points stack up in your mind and you find yourself keeping track of the who-said-what-when-and-to-whom that is the meat and drink of the traditional mystery. This is what we’ve come for, and the patterns that stumble out are as enjoyable as you’d hope, with some accidental revelations among the most striking (the end of chapter 21, for instance, made me hoot out loud).

And then, with everyone gathered together on the stage of the theatre (“It’s a terrific end – just like Agatha Christie!”), we’re treated to Hawthorne’s reconstruction of events and…I dunno, it just did not work for me. The algebra of the deductions simply doesn’t hold the weight I feel it should (rot13 for minor spoilers: G-fuveg + xabjyrqtr bs PPGI = va n eryngvbafuvc) and in key aspects of the plot (the framing of Anthony for the crime, for instance) the actions of the killer simply fall apart (rot13 for major spoilers: vs gur cyna jnf gb senzr Wbeqna, jul abg gnxr gur xavsr ur fgnoorq gur pnxr jvgu? Did I miss something there??). “Between (sic) them, the various suspects must have provided us with plenty of clues,” Anthony reflects at one point, and this is true, but the interpretations put on some of said clues lacks the rigour of The Word is Murder (2017) or Moonflower Murders (2020), which used many of the same principles to far more devastating effect.

But, hey, such is the individual nature of enjoyment that your own mileage will, of course, vary. I can’t deny loving a clue that was lifted whole cloth from Agatha Christie, and the linguistic elements of, let’s say, Harriet Throsby’s acerbic character are wonderfully handled. Additionally, the mystery of Hawthorne himself deepens in a very pleasing manner, and it’s to be hoped that this long game pays off — at least three more books are on the way in this series, so it’s to be hoped that some answers are forthcoming. All told, what’s here is good, and very good at it’s most successful, but I have high hopes for Horowitz and would like to see a little more grist in these mills as he updates the classic murder mystery for the modern age. Sure, I’m a little cool on this overall, but colour me very enthused for book five…

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The Horowitz & Hawthorne mysteries: