The Word Is Murder: A Novel (A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery, 1)

Not my cup of tea The narrator spent the first couple of chapters waffling about himself while name dropping. The Hawthorne character walked through crime scenes with reckless abandon, smoking... really ? And to top it all the murderer referred to his latest victim in the past tense before Hawthorne had told him he was dead half way through the book. Sorry, but I can't think of a positive thing to say about the characters or the plot. RUBBISH RUBBISH RUBBISH.

8/8/23: I don't really have anything new to add to the review this time around. I only reread it because I remembered that I have the sequel and I had forgotten everything about the first book (though I assume that I really could have gone into the sequel without knowing anything from the first book). It was a fun, quick read, but nothing to write home about or particularly memorable.

7/18/19: I'm kind of between a 3 and a 3.5 for this book. It was an enjoyable read, and I thought the mystery was interesting, but the main character (Hawthorne, not the narrator) was annoying and difficult, which was the point of the whole thing, but still, it made it really hard to sympathize with him. I usually need to feel like I can relate to at least some part of a character in order to enjoy reading about them, or at least connect with them on some level, but I found that to be very difficult with Hawthorne, and I felt like I was just mostly frustrated with him and his behavior (and sometimes with the narrator for how willing he was to let Hawthorne just walk over him).

Otherwise, I found the other supporting characters of this novel interesting and charming in the style of old-school mystery novels. Everyone had their own secrets and their own reasons for hiding what they did — and there was a red herring situation and a resolution that seemed worthy of the old-school mystery greats. I do love Horowitz's writing a lot, and in that, he did a really good job here. I also liked the meta aspects of this book since he used himself as the main character/narrator and set everything in the real world (except for the murder mystery, of course), so I liked the little mentions of real world references. The fact that Horowitz is well versed in the publishing world also helped in terms of writing about the experience in his novel. I always love it when authors can put things that they know a lot about in their stories.

I got the second book at a used book sale, so I'll read that soon. I'm interested to see if Hawthorne gets any further character development in the next novel, and the mystery sounds like it's going to be interesting!