Wednesday, October 10, 2018

The Word is Murder

Cover image for The word is murder : a novel
The Word is Murder
by Anthony Horowitz
HarperCollins, 2018, 390 pages, Mystery

One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper - the wealthy mother of a famous actor - enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service. Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home. Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who's as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne wants a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz. Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself at the center of a story he cannot control.

This interesting meta version of a Sherlock Holmes novel, where a fictional version of real-life author Anthony Horowitz plays the part of Dr. Watson, threw me for a bit of a loop at first. But like the fictional version of Horowitz, the more I learned about the case, the more intrigued with the story I became. Horowitz has the elements of a good Sherlock Holmes novel mastered.

The real appeal of this book for me, however, was the audio narration of it. Rory Kinnear blew me away with the wide range of voices used for all of the different characters, and there were a few times where I had to stop what I was doing and just listen and marvel at Kinnear’s voice acting skill. Do yourself a favor and listen to this one!

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