Diana Cowper had planned her funeral and she was going to need it. She was murdered about six hours later that same day.
The Word is Murder
by Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Murder Mystery
About: Diana Cowper walks into a funeral parlour to organise her own funeral, and six hours later, she's murdered. Ex-Detective Hawthorne is hired as a consultant to solve the case, and with him is writer Anthony Horowitz. Horowitz isn't sure just what exactly he's gotten himself into but one thing is for sure: the word is murder.
The Good
Anthony Horowitz is a talented writer. His descriptions are artful and he writes each chapter in a way that tempts you into the next. I loved his Alex Rider series growing up - it was full of action and sharp twists, so it's no wonder his crime writing skills are likewise a fast read that keeps you guessing until the end. Truly. The list of suspects is not long so it shouldn't be a hard murder to solve and yet my (pretty far-fetched) guess was so not right. His subplots work really well to lead you off the trail and have their own surprising mysteries to them.
The Bad
Chapter one is a great hook, but chapter two made me want to put the book down. I recently read Fear in the Sunlight which also has a character who's a murder mystery writer finding herself in a murder mystery, but while I loved that book, I hated Horowitz's version of the same troupe. Writers do sometime have writer characters. It's not unfamiliar territory, and yet to literally put yourself as the character in the book... and for your character to come across so unlikeable? I like Horowitz's books, but he writes himself here as a conceited snob. Chapter two reads like a cry for help, it's a catalogue of his very successful career, which he seems to be tired of, and this idea of writing himself into the novel is somehow his creative answer.
The Somewhat Iffy
While I liked that I didn't guess the murderer correctly, I didn't find the climax chapter a good read. The stress of this book is that it isn't like his other books, where the characters and events are all made-up. This is 'real life crime', and yet the climax reads like a James Bond villain sequence.
Overall
The murder mystery is great, the ex-detective character is interesting and the writing is good but I didn't enjoy the book. The character of Anthony Horowitz doesn't make this crime feel real, if anything it makes me more conscious that I'm reading a work of fiction. It comes off pretentious and made me cringe at how he was describing some of the characters, especially the poorer ones.
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