The second Detective Daniel Hawthorne novel, in which the author is a character, Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes. A wealthy, successful divorce lawyer is found bludgeoned and stabbed to death with his own bottle of Chateau Lafite. Twenty-four hours earlier, an old friend from the victim's Oxford days falls to his death beneath the train tracks. What's the connection? Does it have anything to do with a tragic caving accident the two were involved in years ago?
As I wrote when I reviewed the first in this series, The Word is Murder, while these mysteries are very well plotted and paced, Hawthorne fails as a main character. Yes, he is intensely private and clearly has skeletons in his closet, which is just as it should be for a neo-Sherlock. But Horowitz just doesn't give us enough to connect with, and Hawthorne is still, apparently, a homophobic. (So why did I read this second one? Well, they are entertaining...)
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