From the global bestselling author of Moonflower Murders and Close to Death comes an unputdownable new mystery in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series.


‘Easily the greatest of our crime writers’ Sunday Times
'Nobody does this crime fiction better than Anthony Horowitz’ Crime Time FM
'Anthony Horowitz is a national treasure' Ragnar Jónasson

---------

The good news is that The Word is Murder, the first book in the Hawthorne series, is being turned into a major feature film.

The bad news is that the director is pretentious, the screenwriter thinks she’s Salman Rushdie, the stars hate each other and the producer has run out of money.

And things are about to get much worse.

In the third week of the shoot (in Hastings), the actor playing Hawthorne is murdered. It happens the day after the real Hawthorne and his hopeless assistant have visited the set. And now Hawthorne has no choice.
He has to investigate his own murder.

Is it possible that Hawthorne made the biggest mistake of his career and arrested the wrong man? And is it now time for him to pay the price?

The sixth book in the Hawthorne series is a wild ride through a world that the author knows only too well. It’s going to be the most surprising and shocking case Hawthorne has had to deal with so far.



---------

Readers love the Hawthorne & Horowitz series . . .

***** 'It’s Agatha Christie on steroids!'
***** 'Wow, this has got to be my favourite detective series ever!'
***** 'I had so much fun reading this book'
***** 'Outstanding . . . I loved it'
***** 'Honestly, the best crime read in a long time'

Brilliant . . . the author combines delicious dry humour with a rigorous fair-play whodunnit, but this installment’s Scream-like Hollywood satire takes it to another level * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *
Delightful * Library Journal *

Bestselling author Anthony Horowitz has written two highly acclaimed Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty; three James Bond novels, Trigger Mortis, Forever and a Day and With a Mind to Kill; the acclaimed bestselling mystery novels Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders and Marble Hall Murders; and the Detective Hawthorne novels, The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line To Kill, The Twist of a Knife and Close to Death.


He is also the author of the teen spy Alex Rider series, and responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most loved and successful TV series, including Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. In January 2022 he was awarded a CBE for his services to literature.