Close to Death - Anthony Horowitz ****

By Brian Clegg

There was a danger that by the fifth of his Hawthorne mysteries that started with The Word is Murder, Anthony Horowitz would have stretched the unusual format too far. The other books were written in the first  person, with a fictional version of Horowitz himself acting effectively as Watson to eccentric ex-cop Daniel Hawthorne. But this entry in the series starts in the conventional third person, describing the occupants of an exclusive close in Richmond on Thames and their fractious relationships with a boorish man who it feels is surely going to be the murder victim.

The setting is clever, because the small gated development effectively provides a similarly isolated group of suspects to a traditional country house murder mystery, but better suited to a modern world. And we get a classic varied group of suspects from a chess grandmaster and a ‘dentist to the stars’ to a pair of old ladies. But Horowitz then comes into the story as this was a past case of Hawthorne’s that Horowitz has decided to write up (despite almost universal attempts to persuade him he shouldn’t).

On the whole it all works very well with some clever twists, including a locked room mystery (despite Horowitz claiming he can’t stand them). But the particularly meta nature of the storytelling makes the reader feel more detached than usual, especially in the way that the murder is apparently solved part way through in a way that can’t really be true or there would be no book.

I enjoyed it, and continue to regard Horowitz as one of the best currently active mystery writers… but perhaps in this one he has been just a little bit too clever.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.