In 2018, renowned author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders) published The Word Is Murder, the first volume in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series about a Sherlock Holmes-like detective whose sidekick was a version of Horowitz himself. Five cases later, the entertaining A Deadly Episode revolves around the fictional screen adaptation of the series' first installment. Horowitz and the novel The Word Is Murder are real, but the film and Hawthorne are not. Got that?
A Deadly Episode opens three weeks into filming. Production is rudely halted when David Caine, the actor playing Hawthorne, is stabbed to death in his trailer. Suspects include the producer, the director, the writer, the actor playing Horowitz--pretty much everyone who has worked with Caine. Conveniently, Hawthorne is on location as a consultant and proceeds to investigate.
As he's done throughout this superb series, the real Horowitz delights in taking readers through the metaverse of his career and humiliating his fictional self. Every notable English actor--Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, even Miriam Margolyes, inexplicably--passes on playing the author in the film. Hawthorne gets a car and driver as the film's paid consultant, while Horowitz has to take the train and then walk to the set, where he's merely a spectator. But the real writer is the opposite of pedestrian. As his alter ego digs into Hawthorne's mysterious past, which seems connected to Caine's murder, A Deadly Episode's author reveals new layers to his characters, deepening the bond between them as well as between readers and this series.--Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, reviewer and freelance editor at The Edit Ninja