History Literature / DanielHawthorneNovels

For tropes from ''A Twist of the Knife'' or ''A Line to Kill'', see the work pages. For other tropes in the Hawthorne series, see below.

There are four books in the series so far:

* FriendsRentControl: Hawthorne (a PrivateInvestigator who was fired from the police force before qualifying for a pension and has an ex-wife and son to support) lives in a surprisingly expensive flat. At the end of the first book, he explains that his half-brother is an estate agent who hires him to stay at unoccupied luxury flats as a caretaker.

-->''"I won't talk to you because you're a ***." Swear words bore me. I don't like using them. And he had used one that was unprintable.''

* SelfDeprecation: Horowitz's version of himself continually fails to guess who the murderer is, and in fact has a RunningGag of screwing up Hawthorne's investigations by saying the wrong thing during cross-examinations.

* SequelHook: ''A Line To Kill'' ends with Anthony suspecting that Hawthorne has been lying to him about parts of his past and getting a cryptic postcard from [[spoiler:Norman Abbot]] that says, "Ask Hawthorne about Reeth."

** In ''The Sentence Is Death'', [[spoiler:Greg's death has nothing to do with Philip's murder. He committed suicide rather than die of a terminal disease.]]

#''The Sentence is Death'' (2018)

#''Litearture/TheWordIsMurder'' (2017)

#''The Word is Murder'' (2017)

For tropes from ''A Twist of the Knife'', see the work page. For other tropes in the Hawthorne series, see below.

** Le Mesurier in "A Line to Kill" is such a horrible man that just about every other character has a potential motive.

* BlindSeer: In ''A Line to Kill'', Elizabeth Lovell is a blind psychic. [[spoiler:Although she isn't blind anymore, she really was at one point.]]

* ClosedCircle: Alderney in ''A Line To Kill'', although played with in that the suspects actually do leave after three days and aren't trapped there the whole time.

* ExactWords: In ''A Line To Kill'', Anne says that [[spoiler:her son William was an addict who died by overdose. She doesn't actually say that he was a drug addict - and, in actual fact, he was a ''gambling'' addict.]]

* LifeOrDeathQuestion: In ''A Line To Kill'', Le Mesurier is given the choice of calling a coin toss to save his life. [[spoiler:But because the killers were seeking revenge for a death due to gambling debts, they used a trick coin.]]

* ObfuscatingDisability: In ''A Line To Kill'', [[spoiler:Elizabeth is pretending to be blind. She actually ''was'' blind for a while, but not anymore; she had to make up the vision to explain how she was able to see Derek at the murder scene.]]

#''LiteratureALineToKill'' (2021)

#''A Line to Kill'' (2021)

#''A Twist Of The Knife'' (2022)

There are three books in the series so far:

* TwentyMinutesIntoThePast: "The Word is Murder" is set around 2011. "The Sentence Is Death" is set around 2012. "A Line to Kill" features a TimeSkip to around 2017.

** Philip in "The Sentence Is Death". He only ever paid for anything for Davina to feel better about her husband's death, which he caused, and he refused to pay for his old friend's surgery that would have saved him from a slow and painful death.