In the intriguing if uneven fifth installment of Horowitz's Hawthorne and Horowitz series (after The Twist of a Knife), the author again blends mystery and metafiction to examine a murder in an exclusive London cul-de-sac. After the obnoxious Giles Kenworthy is slain with a crossbow in his home among the ritzy mansions of Riverview Close, police detective Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, John Dudley, jump on the case. At first, owing to Kenworthy's lack of popularity among his neighbors, Hawthorne and Dudley float the idea that it was a collaborative killing in the tradition of Murder on the Orient Express. Then one of their key suspects dies in an apparent suicide, and the case shifts into locked-room mystery territory, with a single killer likely picking off Riverview Close peers one by one. Horowitz again inserts himself in the narrative, working with Hawthorne to turn the case into a proper novel, but he writes much of this volume in third person, turning to his own voice only occasionally to comment on genre conventions or tease the mystery's conclusion. The result is a narrative of frames within frames that gradually loses entertainment value as a fair play mystery and ultimately slips into something far more jumbled. There's plenty of ambition on display, but this isn't up to series standards. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown. (Apr.)

Among his many outstanding accomplishments, Horowitz adapted Caroline Graham's mysteries into the early episodes of the long-running and internationally popular television series Midsomer Murders. Here he's created a tiny Midsomer village within Riverside Close in Richmond, a town near southwest London. The Close includes every manner of resident, including two ex-nuns and a chess celebrity, and becomes the scene of the murder of Charles Kenworthy, found dead on his porch with the bolt of a crossbow through his chest. Kenworthy was an arrogant and obnoxious man, and nothing in the peaceful complex was the same after he moved in. Each of the original residents had their own reason for wanting him dead. Daniel Hawthorne is called in by the baffled police. He is the shadowy (one might say shady) ex-policeman turned private investigator with whom the author himself has solved four earlier cases. Horowitz has perfected metafiction to the point where the reader settles in comfortably for the fifth time as the self-deprecating author engages with the prickly Hawthorne to create a crime novel based on his investigations. An absolutely engrossing tale, including a locked-room second murder, written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to anyone who can figure this one out!HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Horowitz followers and all lovers of diabolically clever mysteries are primed for the latest Hawthorne and Horowitz adventure.