Hawthorne and Horowitz Investigate · #6
A Deadly Episode
They’re making a major feature film of the first Hawthorne/Horowitz mystery novel. Except—they’re behind schedule, they’ve run out of money and . . . oh! The star has just been murdered.
Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne is dead.
Or, rather, the actor playing him in the film adaptation of The Word is Murder is. Rising star David Caine has been stabbed, and it seems that everyone on the set had a motive.
Caine had just fired his PA. He had fallen out with his director, slept with the screenwriter, humiliated his co-star and dropped his agent days before he was about to sign a multi-million-dollar deal to appear in the next Spider-Man movie.
But what if Caine’s murderer had made a mistake? What if it was the real Hawthorne who was the intended victim? For it turns out that the brilliant detective may have got it wrong ten years earlier. An innocent man has died in jail. And perhaps someone has decided that Hawthorne must pay the price.
From the film set on the south coast of England, the story moves to Reeth, in Yorkshire, the village where Hawthorne grew up. A burned-down school, a car accident that isn’t what it seems, blackmail and murder in an Elizabethan country house . . . somehow they combine to unlock the secret of what has happened in Hastings.
For once, the local police are helpful. DS Sarah Milnes gives Hawthorne carte blanche to investigate and there may even be a hint of romance in the air. Which leaves his hapless sidekick, Horowitz, on his own, stumbling his way to the truth.
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, A Deadly Episode is an intriguing page-turner that once again demonstrates why Anthony Horowitz is the reigning king of the modern whodunit.
The series
In a genre obsessed with control, here’s a mystery series that thrives on unpredictability—even for its narrator.
Read full series description
The Hawthorne and Horowitz Investigate novels crack open the traditional detective story and rearrange the pieces with sly wit and unnerving precision. At the center is Daniel Hawthorne, a former detective with a genius for deduction and a habit of keeping everyone—especially his biographer—in the dark. That biographer? A fictionalized version of the author himself, reluctantly dragged into real-life murder cases and quickly realizing that writing the story is nothing compared to living inside it.
What unfolds is more than just a whodunit. These are layered, metafictional mysteries that explore not only the crimes at hand but also the act of storytelling itself. The investigations lead readers through elegant country homes, shadowy corridors, and grimy back alleys, but it’s the strange dance between Hawthorne and his chronicler that gives the series its unsettling charm. Their dynamic is sharp-edged, often funny, and filled with questions—many of which the author may never get answers to.
Told with the kind of confidence that only comes from deconstructing the genre from the inside out, this series invites readers to solve the puzzle even as it rewrites the rules. Clues are laid with care, red herrings are brilliantly placed, and beneath it all, there's an ever-present question: who’s really in control of the story?
Blending classic British mystery with a postmodern twist, this is crime fiction that plays fair—until it doesn’t. And that’s exactly what makes it so irresistible.
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