The metafictional world inhabited by Anthony Horowitz in this series, where he plays Watson to the mysterious, ingenious ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, kicks up a notch in sixth title A Deadly Episode (2026). A film is being made of the first book, The Word is Murder (2017), and early on Horowitz reflects on its being set in Hastings when the events on the book took place 60 miles away in Deal: “I thought it was questionable to take a real tragedy and real pain and to fictionalise it by changing the location”. It’s a sly joke — if ‘joke’ is the word, which I suspect it isn’t — and it speaks to the confidence Horowitz is finding as this series progresses.

I’m taking my life in my hands reviewing The Twist of a Knife (2022) by Anthony Horowitz, you realise.  After all, if I don’t like it, I might end up like Harriet Throsby, the theatre critic for The Times who criticised Horowitz’s play Mindgame and ended up stabbed to death. No, wait, that was fiction…wasn’t it? That’s the plot of The Twist of a Knife. The meta-fictional element of this series, in which Horowitz teams up with ex-D.I. Daniel Hawthorne to solve a series of murders, is loads of fun, but I do catch myself spending the first quarter of each book thinking “Is that a real person? Wait, did that really happen?”. It’s a difficult act to juggle, but Horowitz has mastered it.

Those of us who love a mystery that actually provides clues, hints, indications, and pointers towards a solution we might have had a chance of anticipating were we canny enough have found much to enjoy in the recent career of Anthony Horowitz. Magpie Murders (2016) contains a piece of audacious clewing up there with the best the Golden Age had to offer, and its sequel Moonflower Murders (2020) is rich in such matters. And the Daniel Hawthorne novels, in which a fictionalised version of Horowitz plays Watson to Hawthorne’s vaguely mysterious Holmes, have been less traditional, but no less clever in how they’ve misdirected.