“I had the opportunity to chat with Mr. Hawthorne for a short while before we came in and I can safely say that the next hour is going to be a treat. He is called in to solve only the most difficult cases and, from what I understand, he succeeds every time. He has made many notable arrests, including the killings in Riverside Close that took place in Richmond a few years ago and which you may have read about in the newspapers.” (from A Line to Kill)

If you have been following the adventures of the brilliant, disgraced, and mysterious detective Daniel Hawthorne, you know that his creator, author Anthony Horowitz, is playing a long game. Hawthorne is brilliant because he always solves the case and gets his person. He’s disgraced because some time before his published adventures began, he threw a suspect down a flight of stairs. (Trust me, the guy had it coming.) And he’s mysterious because . . . well, it’s a mystery to me what’s going on in the long game. Which, I suppose, puts me on an intellectual level with Hawthorne’s Watson, a hapless crime novelist named . . . Anthony Horowitz.

The author’s casting of himself as the Watson narrator has been the biggest stroke of genius in this series. Sure, the savvy reader knows better, but it’s still fun to imagine that Horowitz is letting us in on his real life as a novelist, screenwriter, crime-solver’s assistant, and underappreciated mensch. Horowitz knows that a good Watson is neveras smart as his Holmes but always thinks he is. An added personal bonus is that the Hawthorne series, like the Magpie Murder series, lets me wallow happily in a warm bath of meta-fiction, as the homages to classic crime fly fast and loose, including many connected with a certain Queen of Crime. (Go ahead and try convincing me that Anthony Horowitz sharing the same initials as Arthur Hastings is a mere coincidence!)

Back to that long game: in each novel, the author drops bits of information that will eventually piece together the “big mystery” surrounding Hawthorne, including the events surrounding his childhood in Reeth. In the third book, A Line to Kill, Horowitz was forced to invite Hawthorne to a book festival, enduring the double humiliation of being an ineffectual Watson yet again and finding out that everyone at the festival was more interested in the now-famous detective than in his Boswell. This is where Horowitz first heard about “the killings in Riverside Close,” and he made a note to ask Hawthorne about the case one day.

That day has arrived.

Of course, I didn’t remembered this moment until it was mentioned in Close to Death. Instead, I was baffled that, for the first sixty pages, there is no sign of Hawthorne or Horowitz. Instead, the story initially unfolds in the omniscient third person as we enter the posh London development called Riverview Close. Formerly the royal residence for one of King George II’s lesser-known mistresses, the estate has been transformed into six homes, and the gated community provides a welcome respite from the city’s travails for its highly respectable residents: two medical men and their wives, a former chess grandmaster/TV quiz host and his spouse, a retired barrister, and two old ladies who used to be nuns and now run a classic crime bookstore/café in the town of Richmond.

It’s a seemingly idyllic world where all the neighbors live in harmony – until a smarmy finance wizard named Giles Kenworthy moves his blonde trophy wife and two bratty kids into the biggest house in the close and then systematically sets about enraging (and providing motives for) the doctors, the barrister, the chess grandmaster, even the ex-nuns (the old ladies have it particularly rough).

It’s as if Kenworthy is asking to be murdered, and as brutally as possible, but readers might also be asking themselves just where Horowitz and Hawthorne are. They do eventually turn up, and Horowitz has an interesting problem: it seems that there hasn’t been a murder in Great Britain lately that is worthy of Hawthorne’s brain or Horowitz’ pen. (Funnily enough, I recall both Holmes and Poirot complaining often of this very thing!) Since Horowitz is being pressured to meet the deadline for a new book, he decides to write about one of Hawthorne’s old cases, the Riverview Close murders. However, the detective has his reasons for not wanting Horowitz to write this story, and although he relents (he has to, or there won’t be a book for us to read!), the experience puts a new strain on their complicated relationship.

The resulting book has lots to rave about. The set-up is different than usual, the setting and characters are fine, and the book’s structure, where sections alternate between the events surrounding the past case and Horowitz’ attempts in the present to write the book and find out a lot more about Hawthorne, reminds me of Magpie Murders, perhaps my favorite Horowitz mystery. And then things get juicier, as another death follows Kenworthy’s murder, and it is either a suicide or a locked-room mystery. I’ll leave you to guess which one it turns out to be, but Horowitz includes his own lecture on locked room mysteries. It begins: “I have never been a huge fan of so-called ‘locked-room’ mysteries,” so you can rest assured it’s different from Dr. Fell’s!

I appreciated the many homages to the Golden Age in general and to Agatha Christie in particular, including character names – the lawyer is called Andrew Pennington (as in Death on the Nile), and one of the doctors is called Tom Beresford (as in “Tom and Tup”) – and plot points that seem to lead you toward a number of classic Christie tropes. The risk any author runs when they do this, even a writer as clever as Horowitz, is that the reader can’t help comparing the end results of the present-day author to the genius being honored. In the end, the puzzle here is not as strong as the one found in The Sentence Is Death, the second and, to me, so far the best in the series. I thought the killer here was a bit obvious; in fact, I think most of the characters investigating the murders agree with me.

There is a nice little twist in the end which may not be wholly surprising, but it answers a lot of questions set up at the beginning and marks a possibly significant shift in the relationship between Horowitz and Hawthorne. Most significantly, it makes me like the prickly Daniel Hawthorne a bit more. I confess that, after five books, I’m not sure I really care what happened in Reeth anymore. But I love what Horowitz the writer does with Horowitz the character and all those in his circle. Here’s hoping there are many more Hawthorne mysteries – and maybe a series? – to come!