The Sentence Is Death

The Sentence Is Death is the second installment in the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, following on from The Word Is Murder (2017). In each novel, Horowitz is reluctantly roped into chronicling Hawthorne’s investigations, following the brilliant but abrasive private investigator through his cases. The unusual premise of the series is that the real-life author Anthony Horowitz is also its semi-fictional narrator. In creating a narrator who is a self-named fictional persona, inserting known aspects of his public life, Horowitz constructs a meta-narrative that blurs conventional boundaries between author, narrator, and character. In the context of a crime thriller, this deliberate ambiguity is both playful and a means to highlight the uncertain nature of self-projection, storytelling, and appearances. Through its semi-fictional first-person narrative the series self-consciously explores the process of writing a true-crime novel, woven into the parallel crime fiction plot and deliberately raising questions about the nature of fact and fiction, truth and lies.

As the second novel in the series, The Sentence Is Death builds directly on this foundation, further exploring the complex and often contentious partnership between the two men. Although for much of the first novel, Horowitz and Hawthorne maintain relatively professional and harmonious relations, the novel ends with Horowitz feeling betrayed by Hawthorne and furiously resolving never to work with him again.