Book Review: A Line To Kill by Anthony Horowitz

Happy Monday bookish people! Today I am bringing you a book review for A Line To Kill by Anthony Horowitz. I got to read this book in May while I was travelling to Cardiff for a concert.

In this book review I will give star ratings to four categories and I will write a little about each of them. I will do my best to not include any spoilers. I hope you enjoy this book review.

A Line To Kill Plot:

Last year I read Moonflower Murders by this same author, it was the first book I had ever read by Anthony Horowitz and I thought it was a brilliant mystery novel, my review for this is already up, and so when I saw A Line To Kill I wanted it immediately. Especially when I read that the novel is set at a literary festival on a secluded island, it sounded perfect. Now, I enjoyed the overall plot, it was a fast paced plot with a wide range of characters all with their own motive which is the type of novels I enjoy the most for the mystery genre. However, I had some issues with it – one of these being (SLIGHT SPOILER) that I got excited because it looked to have some representation for visual impairments, which I rarely see in books, but towards the end this changed as part of one of the plot twists and that just left me feeling very uncomfortable with both the book and the author. One of the other issues is one I will talk about in the character section. I suppose my greatest issue was that this book just wasn’t as good as Moonflower Murders, the twists weren’t as elaborate and I had guessed the ending a long time before it happened.

A Line To Kill Characters:

For the most part this book had some very good characters, all fleshed out with their own independent qualities and the ‘victim’ was created as a very unlikeable character on purpose so that all the other characters had reasons to murder them. However, the detective character for me was also very unlikeable, he almost made me dislike the whole book because he felt incredibly creepy and not to be trusted yet you were meant to trust him. Also, the ‘main character’ was named Anthony Horowitz, the author put himself in the book as a character, I really did not like this at all, it felt jarring and mixed reality with the fiction and honestly this also made me feel uncomfortable about the author because it made it seem as if the thoughts of the characters were in fact the thoughts of the author.

A Line To Kill Writing and dialogue:

The same as with Moonflower Murders the actual writing of the novel was very good, fast paced, intriguing characters and dialogue that knows how to keep some information a mystery from the reader.

A Line To Kill Overall:

Overall, I gave this book three stars because some of the elements made it an uncomfortable reading experience for me and I found the ending predictable.

Blurb/Synopsis:

The New York Times bestselling author of the brilliantly inventive The Word Is Murder and The Sentence Is Death returns with his third literary whodunit featuring intrepid detectives Hawthorne and Horowitz.

When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don’t expect to find themselves in the middle of murder investigation—or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past.

Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival’s other guests—an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian—along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line.

When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?

Both a brilliant satire on the world of books and writers and an immensely enjoyable locked-room mystery, A Line to Kill is a triumph—a riddle of a story full of brilliant misdirection, beautifully set-out clues, and diabolically clever denouements.

That’s it for this book review, I hope you all enjoyed it. Have you read this book? If you have what did you think of it?