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.

‘You’re here for the same reason as me. You want to know who killed Diana Cowper. If it was one of them, they’ll be arrested. If it wasn’t, we’ll walk away and we’ll never see them again. Either way, what we think about them, what we feel about them, doesn’t make a sod of difference.’

She had lived the last ten years in the shadow of what had happened in Deal until, for her, it had become the new normality. It was as if she had been locked up in a lunatic asylum for so long that she had forgotten she was actually mad.

When they were finally ready to remove him, two men knelt down and wrapped him in polythene which they sealed with gaffer tape. The process turned him into something that reminded me of both ancient Egypt and Federal Express.

‘All right, then. You can get lost. And take Agatha Christie here with you.’ He meant me. Agatha Christie is something of a hero of mine but I was still offended.

Hawthorne in a book group! If he’d told me he was part of a knitting circle, it would be equally incongruous.

You can’t be completely unhappy in Los Angeles. Not when the sun is shining and the garden is full of bougainvillea.