A Line to Kill: a locked room mystery from the Sunday Times bestselling author (Hawthorne and Horowitz, 3)

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There is a running joke about titles in the novels with Hawthorne suggesting ‘Hawthorne Investigates’, and dismissing The Word is Murder as “too poncy”. “I am trying for a literary twist to the titles. The first was The Word is Murder and the second The Sentence is Death . I have painted myself into a corner because you run out of grammatical phrases for a murder story, so perhaps it was a mistake to keep trying to make some kind of allusion to writing.” The setting on the island of Alderney – although it could, perhaps, have been a little more intense, a little more claustrophobic…. It's a tiny island, just three miles long and a mile and a half wide. The perfect location for a brand new literary festival. Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne has been invited to talk about his new book. The writer, Anthony Horowitz, travels with him.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. And A Line to Kill– the third installment of the Hawthorne and Horowitz series – is just that: all the joy and entertainment of a Sunday night cosy detective show. As his regular readers will know, however, Horowitz has none of Christie’s flaws as an author and there are no cardboard cut-out characters, wildly improbable murder methods, or cosy camouflaging of harsh realities of crime and harm here. Alderney does not have a standing police service and although officers from neighbouring Guernsey are flown in, they have little experience with violent crime themselves and it is only natural that they take advantage of Hawthorne’s extensive expertise by recruiting him as an unpaid consultant. The sleuth and the scribbler are there to promote the first of their three proposed Inspector Hawthorne novels. Horowitz sums up the rest of the event’s participants: “an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet. . . . Not quite the magnificent seven.” Then there’s Charles le Mesurier, the online-gaming entrepreneur bankrolling the event, a wealthy and boorish figure who patronizes or taunts most of the men he meets and, though married, puts the moves on every pretty woman. I couldn't see the sea from my bedroom but I could hear the waves breaking in the distance. They reminded me that I was on a tiny island. And I was trapped. '

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Alex Rider is now in its second season based on Eagle Strike adapted by Guy Burt with Otto Farrant returning to play the titular character. There is also Toby Stevens playing the chief antagonist. “I know the first season was popular in India.” Forever Bond This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by The visiting authors - including a blind medium, a French performance poet and a celebrity chef - seem to be harbouring any number of unpleasant secrets. On this occasion, the premise is that Horowitz has been invited to attend a literary fesitval on Alderney – the baby brother island to Guernsey and Jersey, measuring barely 5km long and 2.5 km wide, home to a shade over 2000 souls, according to Wikipedia.

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Very soon they discover that not all is as it should be. Alderney is in turmoil over a planned power line that will cut through it, desecrating a war cemetery and turning neighbour against neighbour. A Line to Kill,” Anthony Horowitz’s third murder mystery pairing a stand-in for himself (a veteran English novelist and screenwriter) with ex-police detective Daniel Hawthorne, takes place mostly at a literary festival on tiny Alderney, one of the Channel Islands. “There’s never been a murder on Alderney,” more than one resident tells Hawthorne and Horowitz. But that’s about to change.