by Anthony Horowitz, 2028, Audiobook narrated by Rory Kinnear, HarperAudio

The book is an entirely innovative approach to a mystery novel. The author, Anthony Horowitz, inserts a fictional character to accompany a crime investigator solving a murder. That fictional character is himself, Anthony Horowitz, the author of the book. Horowitz pictures himself as a Watson type character to other individual’s Sherlock type skills.

The crime they investigate is the murder of a woman by strangulation, the same day she went to a funeral home to arrange her funeral. It seems an odd circumstance that less than six hours after leaving the funeral home she is strangled in her own home. Hawthorne is a former police officer who is hired as a consultant to investigate the murder.

I am currently listening to Louise Penny’s novels that center on another homicide investigator, Armand Gamashe. Gamashe is gentle, kind, and has a very open personality. Hawthorne is evertthing Gemasch is not; he is annoying, abrupt, private, and totally unlikable. It’s fun to experience these two contrasting murder investigators and see their differing approaches to solve a crime.

The characters in the book are done well and the narration is excellent. The writing is also very good. I enjoyed listening.

The plot of this book isn’t the most compelling, but it is well constructed. I didn’t figure out who was committing these murders, but, if I had been paying attention I might have solved the crime before the murderer was revealed. I am rating it a four-star book primarily because of the author’s clever insertion of himself in the novel.