Anthony Horowitz has a problem – he has a deadline to meet for his new book featuring his investigations with ex-police detective Daniel Hawthorne, but there hasn’t been an investigation since the last one he wrote up. So he persuades Hawthorne to give him the case files on one of his old cases – but sometimes the past is best left well alone.

When Giles Kenworthy moved into Riverview Close in Richmond Upon Thames, he shattered the idyllic community with his noisy children and even noisier cars. When he was shot dead by a crossbow bolt, the community closes ranks against the investigation – after all, every single one of them hated him and had the same motive for killing him. Which does make finding the murderer rather tricky…

OK, just to clarify, it’s not the same solution as that train mystery. There are a couple of good jokes about it – not naming the book though, this isn’t The Noh Mask Murder.

Part of me wants to write a really short review of this book. I could sum it up in one word. “Fantastic” springs to mind. Maybe four words – “Best Mystery In Ages”. But last time I wrote a short review (if memory serves, it was a Ngaio Marsh book and the second of two words was “Awful”) I got a bit of flak for it, so I’ll go into a little detail.

Structurally, this does resemble Horowitz’s masterpiece Magpie Murders more than the other Hawthorne books, as it interweaves Hawthorne in the present day with his novelisation of Hawthorne’s notes. The present day starts just with Horowitz talking to Hawthorne, but expands into his own investigation, both into the events of Riverview Close and into Hawthorne’s past (and present).

The mystery at Riverview Close is clever enough, with an old idea at the heart of it, but masked so well, with every character in the drama given real depth but never at the expense of the mystery. As with Magpie/Moonflower, that half of the book would be an excellent tale if that was all it was. But the combination of the past and present stories elevate this to something more than that.

I think the best way to sum up this book is like this. After reading it, I had trouble starting another book because no matter what it was, I knew it wouldn’t be as good as this one. And it wasn’t…

Close To Death is out on Thursday 11^th April from Penguin. Many thanks to the publisher for the review e-copy.

Previously In The Series:

• The Word Is Murder
• The Sentence Is Death
• A Line To Kill
• The Twist Of A Knife