A Line to Kill is a 2021 mystery novel by Anthony Horowitz. It is the third in his series of Daniel Hawthorne Novels.
Once again, Horowitz appears in-story as himself, The Watson to and true-crime writer for brilliant detective Daniel Hawthorne. Horowitz and Hawthorne go to Alderney in The Channel Islands as part of a writers' festival, in order to promote their forthcoming Daniel Hawthorne book. The festival is being sponsored by one Charles le Mesurier, owner of an online gambling site that has made him extremely rich. Le Mesurier is also an irredeemable asshole, a serial adulterer, a sexual harasser, a cruel bully, and an all-around Jerkass. He has also managed to piss off many of the people in Alderney by brokering the installation of a high-voltage power line from France to Britain via Alderney, one which many residents think will ruin the beauty of the island.
So it isn't a shock when Le Mesurier is murdered. But who did it? Maybe one of the other authors invited to the literary festival, like Marc Bellamy, chef and TV cooking show host who has hated le Mesurier since they were schoolmates together, or George Elkin, historian and lifelong resident of the island who is leading the opposition to the power line. Maybe Judith and Colin Matheson, the organizers of the literary festival, who seem to know more than they're telling. Or maybe Charles's bitter widow Helen, who gets all the money.
As the inexperienced cops bumble around, Hawthorne does the real investigating, his faithful scribe Anthony Horowitz tagging along. Anthony eventually finds out that Hawthorne had his own motive for going to Alderney, relating to Derek Abbott, a pedophile and child pornographer who got a light sentence after Hawthorne couldn't make the case, and who is now living on Alderney and worked for le Mesurier.
Tropes:
- Ace Of Spades: The night before he's murdered Charles le Mesurier finds an Ace of Spades on his car windshield. He thinks it's lucky but Anthony knows it's "the death card." The use of a playing card also turns out to be a Chekhov's Gun as the motive for the murder relates to le Mesurier being the owner of a gambling website.
- Asshole Victim: Charles le Mesurier is such a horrible man that just about every other character has a potential motive. To a lesser extent his wife Helen, the second victim, who was involved in the blackmail plot. Also Derek Abbott, the child pornographer Hawthorne shoved down the stairs when he was on the force, also involved in the blackmail plot and a generally loathsome man, who is tricked into killing himself by Hawthorne after being wrongly blamed for the murders.
- Author Avatar: The conceit of the whole Daniel Hawthorne series, as Anthony Horowitz writes himself in as a character, the Watson who is continually irritated by Hawthorne's refusal to tell what he's thinking.
- Blackmail: George Elkin was correct when he guessed that le Mesurier must have had something on Colin Matheson to get him to support the power line. Charles got Helen, his own wife, to seduce Colin, and videotaped the sex, then threatened to tell Colin's wife if he didn't back their deal.
- Blind People Wear Sunglasses: Anthony notes that Elizabeth Lovell has her back to the window to the ocean but then observes that "she had no interest in the view: her round black glasses spoke for themselves."
- Blind Seer: One of the authors at the literary festival, Elizabeth Lovell, is a blind woman who claims that going blind gave her the power to talk to spirits on "the other side of the mirror", aka the afterlife. She calls it "blind sight". Subverted in that Daniel and Anthony are both positive she's faking, and they're right. Double subverted when it turns out she isn't even blind.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Helen le Mesurier may be bitchy, but Anthony still can't help but notice her party dress that "covered very little", comparing her to Marilyn Monroe while noting "the generous curves of her body."
- Chekhov's Gun: A couple of references are made to Kathryn Harris's over-large glasses. They're part of a disguise to mask her resemblance to Anne Cleary, who is her mother.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: A jittery Helen demands a cigarette and gets one from Hawthorne, the morning her husband is found dead.
- Closed Circle: Alderney, a rather small island, although played with in that the suspects actually do leave after three days and aren't trapped there the whole time.
- Connected All Along: Anne Cleary the children's book author, and Kathryn Harris the unfortunate drudge who works for Marc Bellamy, are revealed to be mother and daughter. Kathryn schemed to get her boss invited to the literary festival so that she and her mother could kill Charles le Mesurier.
- Death of a Child: In the backstory. Anne Cleary is haunted by the suicide of her son, who died when he was in college.
- Driven to Suicide: Derek Abbott kills himself rather than go back to jail for blackmail and possibly murder. Anthony realizes that Hawthorne deliberately told Abbott that the cops were going to arrest him, so that Abbott would kill himself.
- Exact Words: Anne Cleary says that her son William killed himself when he was away at school and he was "an addict." She does not explain that he was a gambling addict, which turns out to be key to the solution.
- French Maid: Kathryn Harris wears a French maid costume while serving drinks at le Masurier's party. Anthony watches le Mesurier drunkenly hit on her and is disgusted, but it turns out to be deliberate by Kathryn, part of a Honey Pot scheme.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: While Hawthorne has some sympathy for the suicide of Anne Cleary's son, he bluntly tells her that it doesn't justify murder.
- Hate Sink: Both Charles le Mesurier, a man so deeply unpleasant that everyone on the island had reason to want him dead, and Derek Abbott, a child pornographer described by Horowitz as the most loathsome man he has ever met. Lampshaded in the latter case, as Horowitz dreads the idea of Abbott being guilty because he's so hateful that he doubts any of his readers will care if he did it.
- Honey Pot:
- Sexy Helen le Mesurier seduced Colin Matheson in order to get incriminating sex footage to blackmail him with. It was her husband's idea.
- The ending reveals that Kathryn Harris put on a French maid costume for the party and lured Charles away with the promise of sex, only to kill him.
- Inspector Lestrade: Deputy Chief Jonathan Torode, sent over from Guernsey as Alderney is so small it doesn't even have cops. He is clearly out of his depth while also resenting Hawthorne's presence. The epilogue notes that he was fired for incompetence.
- Karma Houdini: Kathryn Harris beats the rap, acquitted of murder after Anne said Kathryn didn't know Anne was going to kill Charles, and wasn't involved in Anne's murder of Helen. Anthony doesn't buy it, thinking that Kathryn must have been there when Charles was killed and must have been the one to lure Helen to the cave, but Anne's death and Hawthorne's testimony as a character witness got her off the hook.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: Horowitz suspects that a variation was done for Derek Abbott, who Hawthorne appears to have warned about his impending arrest the night before in order to give him time to kill himself as he said he'd do if he thought he was going back to prison. Unlike many examples this is done out of personal animosity rather than mercy.
- Let Off by the Detective: Defied. Anne Cleary appeals to Hawthorne for this but he bluntly refuses.
- Life-or-Death Question: Le Mesurier is given the choice of calling a coin toss to save his life. But not really, because the killers admitted they were going to murder him regardless.
- Literal Metaphor: Anthony and Hawthorne catch George Elkin painting anti-power line "BAN NAB" protest signs. Anthony sees the red paint on Elkin's hand and thinks that they caught him "quite literally, red-handed."
- Narrative Profanity Filter: When Derek Abbott flings an obscenity at Hawthorne, it's rendered "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.
- Never Going Back to Prison: Derek Abbott, who avoided a long sentence for child abuse and distribution of child pornography but got a shorter sentence for having child porn on his own computer, swears that he'll never go back to jail no matter what. He kills himself before the cops can arrest him for the murder of le Mesurier.
- Never One Murder: Helen le Mesurier is murdered barely a day after her husband.
- Obfuscating Disability: Elizabeth Lovell is just pretending to be blind—or rather, she used to be blind, but eye surgery restored her sight, and she's kept up the pretense as part of her Blind Seer, Phony Psychic racket.
- Perfumigation: Played for a minor Hawthorne gotcha. Anthony smells editor Graham Lucas's aftershave and doesn't like it. In the next chapter Hawthorne deduces that Lewis is actually having an affair with publicity director Tamara Moore, because that "aftershave" was actually the scent of her perfume.
- Phony Psychic: Elizabeth Lovell isn't even that subtle about it, practicing obvious cold reading techniques while at the same time doing research in advance. Anthony and Hawthorne both see through her and Anthony is sickened when Elizabeth pretends to be talking to the spirit of Anne Cleary's dead son.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: Anthony realizes that Maissa Lamar the poet stole the haiku she reads at her public reading from Akira Anno, the feminist poet from The Sentence Is Death. Subverted when it turns out that Lamar isn't a poet at all, she's an undercover cop.
- Real-Person Cameo: Hilda Starke, Anthony Horowitz's agent in real life, pops up as his agent in this book. Anthony is mildly peeved at her for not giving his career enough attention.
- Refuge in Audacity: Hawthorne calls out Anne and Kathryn as murderers, refusing their plea to be Let Off by the Detective and telling them that they've got to answer for their crimes. Then he pulls out a copy of one of Anne's children's books and asks her to autograph it, as his son is a big fan. She does.
- Self-Deprecation: As usual, Horowitz's version of himself misses almost every clue and screws up Hawthorne's investigation by Saying Too Much. It's also repeatedly established that almost nobody at the literary festival has heard of him or thinks his books are any good, with the only apparent exception being the child pornographer Derek Abbott who Horowitz is annoyed to realize has a copy of one of his books in his house.
- Sequel Hook: At the very end Anthony gets a postcard-from-the-grave from Derek Abbott, saying only "Ask Hawthorne about Reeth." (Reeth being a village in Yorkshire.)note
- Sexy Secretary: Kathryn Harris, Marc Bellamy's assistant and gofer, is "very attractive, slim, with grey eyes and sand-coloured hair." At the party, which Bellamy is catering, she wears a sexy French maid outfit. Le Mesurier the dirtbag hits on her more than once.
- Sympathetic Murderer: Anne Cleary murdered Charles le Mesurier as revenge for the death of her son, who killed himself after his life was ruined by addiction to le Mesurier's gambling site. Earlier in the book, Horowitz ponders how most killers in Agatha Christie are this and prays that Derek Abbott isn't the killer because it would be impossible to make him even slightly sympathetic.
- Terminally-Ill Criminal: Anne kills the two people she blames for her son being Driven to Suicide after becoming addicted to gambling. She has a fatal heart disease and asks Hawthorne and Horowitz to spare her accomplice, her daughter Katherine, as a result. Hawthorne declines, but the jury clearly sees Katherine as a Sympathetic Murderer and acquits her. Anne dies before she can be sentenced.
- Title Drop: Hawthorne notes that there's something like a dozen people with reason to kill Charles le Mesurier and says "It's a line to kill if ever I saw one."
- Two Dun It: Anne Cleary and Kathryn Harris, who are revealed to be mother and daughter, worked together to kill Charles and probably also Helen, although both of them insist that Anne killed Helen all alone.
- A True Story in My Universe: In-Universe, Horowitz is Daniel Hawthorne's "biographer" and the Hawthorne books are true crime stories. When this one seems to be ending with the most obvious and least interesting suspect as the killer, and with that suspect committing suicide, Anthony worries that he might not have a book.
- Undercover Cop Reveal: Maissa Lamar the poet turns out to not be a poet at all. She and the mysterious blond-haired man who was following her are French undercover cops who were on Alderney to investigate accusations of corruption related to the NAB high-voltage power line. This trope is played out differently than how it usually goes, when Hawthorne unmasks them both as bumbling dopes who found le Mesurier's body but didn't tell anybody, thus letting the scene go cold, and also left bloody footprints and a smear of blood in le Mesurier's office, further confusing the murder investigation.
- Who Murdered the Asshole: Charles Le Mesurier, the school bully, faithless husband, sexual harasser, blackmailer, and all-around creep, is murdered. (Naturally, the killer is a character who appeared to have no problem at all with Le Mesurier.)
- You Know the One: Early in the book Anthony mentions the first two Hawthorne books, involving the murder of one Diana Cowper and then the murder of a divorce lawyer, without mentioning the killer in either.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Anne Cleary reveals one reason why she was driven to her murder scheme: she has serious heart disease and could die at any moment. She has a heart attack and dies barely a month after she's arrested.
