The Word is Murder (Hawthorne & Horowitz #1)

by Anthony Horowitz

I got the feeling that he might have been very handsome as a child but something had happened to him at some time in his life so that, although he still wasn’t ugly, he was curiously unattractive. It was as if he had become a bad photograph of himself.

These are my words but they were his actions and the truth is that, to begin with, the two didn’t quite fit.

Death for me had always been little more than a necessity, something that moved the plot on. But standing in the bedroom of a woman who had so recently died, I could feel it right there beside me.

I found myself wondering what it must be like to work there, sitting in a room with those miniature urns, a constant reminder that everything you were and everything you’d achieved would one day fit inside.

They had no idea what sort of man he was, that he was only waiting for the right moment to dissect them. For him, politeness was a surgical mask, something he slipped on before he took out his scalpel.

You never realise how fragile everything is until it breaks. And that day it was all smashed.

Hawthorne’s brand of low-key menace – the pale skin, the haunted eyes – was off-putting at the best of times. In a cemetery it was positively sinister. If a vampire had decided to turn up for the funeral it might have been less unnerving.