The Word is Murder : A Novel
Author(s): Anthony Horowitz
**A Guardian 'Best Thriller of the Year!'**
The New York Times bestselling author of Magpie Murders and Moriarty brilliantly reinvents the classic crime novel once again with this clever and inventive mystery starring a fictional version of the author himself as the Watson to a modern-day Holmes, investigating a case involving buried secrets, murder, and a trail of bloody clues.
A woman crosses a London street.
It is just after 11am on a bright spring morning, and she is going into a funeral parlor to plan her own service.
Six hours later the woman is dead, strangled with a crimson curtain cord in her own home.
Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric man as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. And Hawthorne has a partner, the celebrated novelist Anthony Horowitz, curious about the case and looking for new material.
As brusque, impatient, and annoying as Hawthorne can be, Horowitz—a seasoned hand when it comes to crime stories—suspects the detective may be on to something, and is irresistibly drawn into the mystery. But as the case unfolds, Horowitz realizes he’s at the center of a story he can’t control . . . and that his brilliant partner may be hiding dark and mysterious secrets of his own.
A masterful and tricky mystery which plays games at many levels, The Word Is Murder is Anthony Horowitz at his very best.
Review(s):
Praise for Moriarty: “[A] deliciously twisty new novel.”
“A no-nonsense writer Horowitz proceeds briskly and ladles out spills and thrills with aplomb.”
“A page-turner that is exhilarating and infuriating in equal measure.”
“A compendium of dark delights. . . . A brilliant pastiche of the English village mystery and a hugely enjoyable tale of avarice and skullduggery in the world of publishing.”
“Great fun . . . [for] readers who can’t get enough of James Bond at his coolest and suave-est.”
“Sharp-witted readers who think they’ve solved the puzzle early on can rest assured that they’ve opened only one of many dazzling Christmas packages Horowitz has left beautifully wrapped under the tree.”
“A book firmly rooted in the style of Doyle, faithful to the character as created and with just enough wiggle room to allow the author to say all the things he’s been longing to say about the world of 221B Baker Street...THE HOUSE OF SILK will satisfy.”
“…fiendishly clever new thriller…In true Conan Doyle tradition, all the clues are skillfully hidden in plain sight, but readers will sail right past them until a shocking twist forces them to replay the entire sequence of events in their heads, begrudgingly admiring the author for his audacity.”
“[In The House of Silk,] Watson’s elegiac voice should silence the objections of even the most persnickety Sherlock scholar.”
“Horowitz has written a humdinger of a Bond story, so cunningly crafted and thrillingly paced that 007’s creator would have been happy to have owned it. . . . From his brilliant first chapter on, Horowitz is a pitch-perfect mimic of the Fleming one-line punch.”
ISBN: 9781443455480