A Line to Kill: a locked room mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling author (Hawthorne and Horowitz, 3)

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Alex Rider is now in its second season based on Eagle Strike adapted by Guy Burt with Otto Farrant returning to play the titular character. There is also Toby Stevens playing the chief antagonist. “I know the first season was popular in India.” Forever Bond The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids.

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. Lesley is absolutely wonderful and Cattaneo is one of the most brilliant directors I’ve worked with.”The sleuth and the scribbler are there to promote the first of their three proposed Inspector Hawthorne novels. Horowitz sums up the rest of the event’s participants: “an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet. . . . Not quite the magnificent seven.” Then there’s Charles le Mesurier, the online-gaming entrepreneur bankrolling the event, a wealthy and boorish figure who patronizes or taunts most of the men he meets and, though married, puts the moves on every pretty woman. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

And A Line to Kill– the third installment of the Hawthorne and Horowitz series – is just that: all the joy and entertainment of a Sunday night cosy detective show. As his regular readers will know, however, Horowitz has none of Christie’s flaws as an author and there are no cardboard cut-out characters, wildly improbable murder methods, or cosy camouflaging of harsh realities of crime and harm here. Alderney does not have a standing police service and although officers from neighbouring Guernsey are flown in, they have little experience with violent crime themselves and it is only natural that they take advantage of Hawthorne’s extensive expertise by recruiting him as an unpaid consultant.Many thanks to Anthony Horowitz and Penguin Books for the chance to read this ARC, courtesy of NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. I loved this smartly written whodunit, but it's the characters of Hawthorne and Horowitz that have completely won me over.' Alderney is in turmoil over a planned power line that will cut through it, desecrating a war cemetery and turning neighbour against neighbour.

I couldn't see the sea from my bedroom but I could hear the waves breaking in the distance. They reminded me that I was on a tiny island. And I was trapped. ' On the television front Horowitz says, Magpie Murders has been adapted into a six-episode series with Lesley Manville as the editor Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan as Atticus Pünd, the detective in the book within the book. The Full Monty director, Peter Cattaneo, helms the show. From the latest Scandinavian serial killer to Golden Age detective stories, we love our crime novels!

A Line to Kill is set just before the publication of The Word is Murder (the first in the series) and opens with Hawthorne and Horowitz being invited to speak at a literary festival on the tiny Channel Island of Alderney. Alderney is only three square miles in size, home to about 2,000 people, and has never had a murder… until the detective duo arrives. The novel is very much an homage to Agatha Christie, particularly the later Poirot novels, and she is mentioned both explicitly and implicitly, for example in a chapter title. Following Christie, Horowitz spends nearly a third of the narrative setting the scene for the murder: a small literary festival on a tiny island establishes a limited pool of suspects in a convincing manner; tensions concerning the construction of a Normandy-Alderney-Britain power line disturb the peace of an otherwise idyllic community; and a suitably obnoxious murder victim is presented in the form of Charles le Mesurier. Insisting he loves all his writing, Horowitz admits a partiality for the Alex Rider books, which has helped a whole generation find literature, books and reading.