It’s readily apparent Anthony Horowitz is having fun writing this series, casting himself as the hapless sidekick to the gruff but brilliant ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne.

I thought the idea of putting himself in the book was something of a gimmick when I first learned of it, but Horowitz really pulls it off in this series. Hawthorne says that Anthony's only saying that because he's depressed and he'd be in a better mood if the weather were better. In “The Word Is Murder” the fictional Anthony Horowitz acted as a modern-day Watson to a modern-day Holmes, a former Scotland Yard detective-turned private detective named Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, unconventional and immensely unlikable investigator.

But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M. While this blurring of reality and fiction — the cases are clearly fake, but Horowitz includes many real facts about his life — was convincing in the first installment, it grows tiring in the second.

But while Akira’s descriptions always show her to be completely awful and out of hand — even when she has reason to be angry — Adrian is given a much kinder treatment: “Adrian Lockwood was the sort of man who was hard to dislike although he was doing everything he could to help us on our way. Confronted with this most baffling of mysteries, the police are forced to turn to private investigator Daniel Hawthorne. Although Horowitz mentions countless times that Hawthorne acts oddly or rudely to queer characters, he doesn’t make a particularly strong effort to rebuke Hawthorne or otherwise remedy Hawthorne’s problematic behavior.If you enjoy 'cosy' crime and complicated mysteries that are more about the pleasure of solving a puzzle than the realities of modern policing, it's very likely you will enjoy this book at the others in the series. Readers are warned that the narrator’s fondest hope—“I like to be in control of my books”—will be trampled and that the Sherlock-ian solution he laboriously works out is only the first of many. Anthony then says he won't be attempting to reproduce Yorkshire speech because "it will look ridiculous on the page.

Horowitz" observes that he likes to create his own stories and be in control of his characters, when of course in Real Life he is. He was dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt and a narrow tie, clothes that might have been deliberately chosen to say nothing about him. Colin is the killer, having gone over to Pryce's home and killed him after overhearing Greg Taylor admit to Davina that he and Richard abandoned Charlie in the cave to drown. He had a sort of cheerful self-confidence that was actually quite cold-blooded, utterly focused on his own needs at the expense of everyone else’s.It often seems that the entire city is deliberately doing everything in its power to stop the cameras turning.