The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne & Horowitz #4)

by Anthony Horowitz

He might have a moral compass, but he was the one who would decide which way it pointed.

Enough was enough. I was fed up of being treated

like an appendage.

Authors don’t write their books for other people. We write for ourselves.

Theatre, at its best, is a candle that never goes out and all of these productions, along with many more, still burn in my memory.

The Victorians really wanted you to enjoy your evening so they went crazy with the gilt and the red plush, the mirrors and the chandeliers, making sure that the sense of drama would begin long before

you sat down. It’s strange that they were less concerned about leg room, sight lines and toilets, but I suppose you can’t have everything.

The theatre was going to be full tonight: almost seven hundred people on three levels. I could see them all around me, many of them in the shadows, diminished by the distance between us. They were no longer individuals. They were an audience

. . . perhaps even a jury. My stomach was still churning. I felt like the condemned man.

‘This Turkish wine tastes like cat’s piss.’

But, of course, you never know these things at the time. That’s why life is so different to fiction. Every day is a single page and you have no

chance to thumb forward and see what lies ahead.

both of them gazing at me like hyenas who have stumbled across a fresh carcass.

so?’ Arthur Throsby didn’t look so sure. ‘Harriet wanted to move. She’d been talking about it for a while, but I suppose

‘I never believe everything anyone says.’ ‘Including me?’ He smiled. ‘Why would I believe someone who spends his entire life making stuff up?’

It was as if he had recognised how few pleasures he had in his life, making him all the more determined to cling on to the few that remained. Murder and cigarettes. That about summed him up.

I was finally getting the measure of the woman. It was just the identity of her killer that defeated me.

‘Of course I remember Harriet,’ he was telling us. ‘A frightful woman. Good writer, though. She never let the facts get in the way of a good story.’

Some of the stuff he wrote – well, he could be a bit harsh. That was something Harriet

learned from him, the pleasure that comes with the twist of a knife.