Literacy 2025: Book 18: Close to Death

Book
Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

Series
Book 5 in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series

Synopsis
When one of the residents of a small, gated, community in London is murdered, the neighbors are all the most obvious suspects. It became one of Daniel Hawthorne’s first cases collaborating with Scotland Yard since he left the police, and it seems like straightforward material for Anthony Horowitz’s fifth book about the brilliant detective. But Hawthorne is reluctant to give Horowitz much information about the resolution of the case, or about his partner at the time. As Horowitz wonders if he’s even got enough material for a book, he starts to learn that there are a lot of people who don’t want him digging up the past.

Notes
I’ve already been getting increasingly annoyed by this series, but keep getting them because any Anthony Horowitz book is almost always an engaging, fun read. I think this might be the point where the gimmick has finally run out of steam. The book was fine overall; it’s a decent murder mystery, even if the “locked room” component was a little bit of a cheat for most readers, and the resolution was a bit implausible. But while I really appreciated the attempt to change things up a bit with this one, while still keeping the “meta-murder mystery” feel to it, the changes left it without enough of a hook to make it interesting.

The concept behind the series is really clever. Horowitz casts himself as the Dr Watson to a brilliant fictional detective, but describes the case as if everything really happened. So there’s often a neat ambiguity between what’s real and what’s fictional, and he’s describing the process of writing the book and solving the mystery while the story is still in progress.

My main complaint with the series is that Hawthorne is such an abrasive character, without enough eccentricities to make him as appealing a character as Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. That’s not as much of a problem here, but only because Hawthorne is more or less a cipher. There’s barely any characterization at all. And his previous partner is, somehow, even less interesting. Meanwhile, Horowitz has greatly dialed back on setting himself up to be a hapless punching bag, as he throughout the other books, but ends up just mentioning his Alex Rider books over and over again.

Verdict
Still a reasonably solid murder mystery, and I do like the attempt to present the story as a work in progress, taking place at the time of the case and also in the present day. But there are very few interesting characters, and not much of a hook.