A Line to Kill: a locked room mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling author (Hawthorne and Horowitz, 3)

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In the tradition of murder mystery novels, a big reveal is written towards the end with a full explanation of the crime.

He is also the author of the teen spy Alex Rider series, and responsible for creating and writing some of the UK's most loved and successful TV series, including Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War. On this occasion, the premise is that Horowitz has been invited to attend a literary fesitval on Alderney – the baby brother island to Guernsey and Jersey, measuring barely 5km long and 2.It is undeniably beautiful and picturesque – and for the purposes of this novel unspoiled by almost any crime having never had a murder case.

Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc. Fans of the author’s formidable brain teasers, certain that the devil is in the details, will be a lot more confident than he is. Some of the ongoing questions hanging around Daniel Hawthorne are answered in this book but many are not and a few new issues are raised, all of which lead nicely into the next novel in this series. Hawthorne is also the one who is leading the interrogations often employing a brash attitude that always gets him the desirable results.The partners deliver a few punchlines of their own in this fast-moving story that’s replete with twists and danger. I loved this smartly written whodunit, but it's the characters of Hawthorne and Horowitz that have completely won me over. I had missed many of the clues as they had all been quite muddled with a huge number of misdirection. His descriptive phrases encompass all the senses - just on the first page "traffic that rushes past like dust in the vacuum tube of a hoover" encourages visions, smell, sound and even the taste of the fumes. The beginning of the novel, when Bond is captured and Mr Big’s henchman, Teehee, breaks Bond’s finger, makes me sweat when I read it.