It’s possible that the more books I read books by Anthony Horowitz the more I enjoy them and I think this may be one of his most enjoyable adult mysterie,  but I haven’t read them all yet.    https://mybecky.blog/2021/11/07/a-line-to-kill-anthony-horowitz/.   

The Sentence is Death
by Anthony Horowitz 
2019 / 
Read by Roy Kinnear 8h 36m
Rating – A+  / mystery 
(A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery, Book 2)

Sad to say that my second in the Hawthorn and Horowitz series was actually #3. My bad for not paying attention. https://mybecky.blog/2021/10/27/the-sentence-is-death-by-anthony-horowitz  So now I’m listening to #2 with #4 on the Wish List.  Yay!  Should I just plunge right in? 

The conceit here, as in several other books by Horowitz, because it seems to work for him, is that Hawthorne is a a kind of celebrity detective and uses Horowitz, a well-established crime writer (as the author is in real life), as his biographer. But Hawthorne pays Horowitz to follow him around as Hawthorne attempts to solve murders under contract with the police department. Horowitz’s job is to write Hawthorne’s biography, but he’s not happy about this arrangement.  Horowitz is the first person in this and Hawthorne is an arrogant and very mysterious, secretive may be a better word, character (so to speak.  It’s a spin on Sherlock Holmes. 

The victim this time is Richard Price, a divorce lawyer who has been clobbered with a bottle of wine and dies. Who? why? The unhappy ex-wife of a client is a distinct possibility.  Hawthorn is on the investigation from the start and, at Hawthorn’s request, Horowitz is shadowing him to write a biography.  The story slowly gets complicated and there are 56 characters and this link came in handy:
https://www.bookcompanion.com/the_sentence_is_death_character_list.html

The narration is very difficult for awhile but I did get used to it and I’ll look forward to listening to Ray Kinnear in the next book of the series.