'The Sentence is Death'

06/18/2019

Good Morning,

This is the voice of Graham Feltham.  I'm writing from my desk in Berkeley, California.  The fog lay heavy over Berkeley this morning, but the clouds have parted to reveal a washed-out blue sky high above the tops of the trees.  A cool breeze is blowing up off the bay, and I've just taken my load of laundry out of the dryer down the block.   The windows in our apartment are open a crack, but it's cool enough that I'm wearing a sweatshirt and a beanie.

I'm almost done with 'The Sentence is Death', by Anthony Horowitz.  It is the follow-up to a novel I'd previously read, entitled 'The Word is Murder."  The two books comprise the series Mr. Horowitz wrote which follow the investigative techniques of Hawthorne, an ex-detective with the Metropolitan Police, in London.

The narrator, Mr. Horowitz, as himself, in the first person, is reluctantly dragged into a murder investigation which spins him all over London, as well as Yorkshire, in pursuit of clues.  The detective himself, Mr. Hawthorne, is largely a mystery.  Much of the tension in the book centers around the fact that the author, and we the readers, know almost nothing about his subject.  He repeatedly tries to delve into Hawthorne's personal history, but is rebuffed.  What we do know is that Hawthorne is a homophobe, he endured some sort of hardship when he was young, and he lives in a flat by the river Thames that he neither owns nor has decorated in a way that would reveal anything about himself.

The book is set up very much like a traditional 'who-dunnit', in the sense that the majority of the novel is taken up with the process of tracking down clues concerning the murder which is the focal point of the entire work.  Ultimately, a sort of grand reveal will inform us of the identity of the murder, using clues we, as the readers, have been given access to but haven't been told their significance in the grand scheme of the plot.  Mr. Horowitz is open with the fact that he holds writers such as Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in high esteem, and his writing reads like an homage to their brand of murder mystery.

The overall tone is somewhat dry and self-effacing, and the reading is pleasurable and easy, without any of the visceral angst or violence that predominates much of the writing in the murder genre, especially by Mr Horowitz' Scandinavian contemporaries.  'The Sentence is Death' reads as very British, using London itself as one of the predominant characters in the book.  Overall, it is a light, pleasant foray into a classic genre, which Horowitz hasn't seen fit to change all that much in its presentation.  He comes across as the Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes, and, as the book progresses (I've not yet finished), I'm confident that everything will be wrapped up neatly and tidily in the last chapter.  Indeed, the author has referenced his desire to do so already in the pages of the book.

It is satisfying in its adherence to traditional tropes, but a little bit dry when compared with series by authors such as Jo Nesbo or even Anne Perry. 

I feel that I should use some sort of a scoring system for the books I read.  As such, I'd give the aforementioned novel a.....

6.5/10

The approach to the writing itself is unique, in that the narrator is a character in the story; ostensibly the same as the character of the writer in real life.  The writer writes about the act of writing, while experiencing the events that will then comprise the book that said writer will eventually write.  It's all a bit meta.  Something about the writing, the self-awareness, leads me to believe that Anthony Horwitz has a high opinion of himself.

There are some twists and turns, but overall I wasn't particularly compelled by this novel.