The Word Is Murder

This review is spoiler-free
Read on In The Sheets

The Word is Murder is the first book in a new murder mystery series staring Anthony Horowitz as himself alongside Detective Hawthorne who has tasked “Tony” with writing a true crime detective series about his case(s). 

It sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does and it's awesome. After reading Magpie Murders which was another really meta take on murder mystery (as it's a book within a book that references the other book as well as itself) I didn't expect anything less than brilliance and ordered this the day it was released in the UK.

Horowitz writes and organizes the book in such a way that his real characters and events combine effortlessly with his fictional characters and events to make the story seem that much more real and compelling.  You know you're reading fiction, but the fictional characters seem so real and developed that you often find yourself questioning whether or not they exist and if the events actually happened. For example, there's an actor who appears throughout the novel whose IMDB page I looked for on more than one occasion. It doesn't exist. I saved you a Google search.

I can't stress enough how good this book is. Anthony's work on the Sherlock Holmes series and Trigger Mortis were good, but his original murder mysteries and characters are some next level shit, for lack of a better term.

I was elated when I got to the back of the book and realized this was the start of a series and there was more to come. I was then immediately depressed because I likely have to wait a year for more.

For the record, while I loved this book immensely, I'm still not a fan of the detective as a human being (at least what I know about him which, oddly, isn't a lot), but he's a phenomenal detective which just speaks volumes to Anthony's writing

Buy the book, ‘nuff said.