Close to Death

Close to Death is the fifth novel in Anthony Horowitz’s popular Hawthorne and Horowitz series. The first Hawthorne and Horowitz novel, The Word Is Murder (2017), introduced private investigator Daniel Hawthorne, a sharply intelligent, reclusive, and sometimes morally ambiguous detective who the police consult with on what he calls “stickers:” “the crimes that are like no others because there’s an intelligence behind them” (360).

In the first novel, Hawthorne approaches Horowitz, a well-known British screenwriter and novelist, to accompany him and write true crime novels based closely on his investigations. This first novel was followed by The Sentence Is Death (2018), A Line to Kill (2021), The Twist of a Knife (2022), and this novel, Close to Death, in 2024. The metafictional strategy that Horowitz adopts with the series adds a twist to what would otherwise be a straightforward mystery narrative: Horowitz, the author, places himself in the novel as Horowitz, the character, speaking directly to the reader about both the investigation and the writing process.

Hawthorne and Horowitz are an odd-couple detective duo, and their collaboration isn’t always an easy one. While Hawthorne has the finely tuned investigative instincts of a Sherlock Holmes-type detective, Horowitz, although a seasoned mystery writer, often falls behind. Hawthorne finds Horowitz’s lack of insight both amusing and infuriating by turns, and Horowitz is continually frustrated by Hawthorne’s opacity—he knows very little about the man and not much more about his investigative methods. As the series continues, Horowitz pieces together Hawthorne’s past, but what he discovers seems to raise more questions than it answers.

This discovery process continues in Close to Death when Horowitz finally comes face-to-face with the head of Fenchurch International, the shadowy global security firm where Hawthorne works. However, at the end of the novel, he knows little more than he did at the beginning. Although each of the novels contains discovered pieces of Hawthorne’s history, they are written to stand alone and don’t require the reader to be familiar with the previous novels in the series.