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. This frames the premise of The Sentence Is Death and is one of numerous internal references: While the plot of The Sentence Is Death functions independently, the novel’s subtleties rely heavily on the series context, and the series is clearly intended to be read sequentially if possible. The familiar reader’s experience is informed by knowledge of the first book, as the second novel enriches the duo’s established dynamic through inside jokes, recurring tension points, and explicit references to shared history. The novel also deepens the central mystery of Hawthorne himself, a character who remains deliberately opaque to his supposed biographer. The series thus operates on two levels: the solving of the immediate murder case and the forensic exploration of the relationship between the narrator and his enigmatic subject. This continuing frame invites readers to invest not just in the “whodunit” puzzle but also in the evolving story of its creation.

To date, Horowitz has written a total of five novels in the series. This places the significant cliffhanger of The Sentence Is Death’s conclusion in an important series context, as new readers will likely be aware that the partnership must continue, despite Horowitz’s explicit reservations about the future. In a characteristic internal reference, this Horowitz’s reluctance to continue to partnership mirrors his resolutions at the end of the first book, while simultaneously calling into question the strength of his continued resistance. This is an example of the series’ meta-fictional portrayal of an author as drawn into a narrative against his will and outside his control.