The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids. The beginning of the novel, when Bond is captured and Mr Big’s henchman, Teehee, breaks Bond’s finger, makes me sweat when I read it. There are, however, parts of the book which I would not write myself, which we would feel uncomfortable reading.” Horowitz says he sees no need to prune out the uncomfortable bits from the legacy sequel as it is not the way he thinks. It's a tiny island, just three miles long and a mile and a half wide. The perfect location for a brand new literary festival. Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne has been invited to talk about his new book. The writer, Anthony Horowitz, travels with him. My first thought was, is the detective British or from another country, man or woman? What is the ethnicity, sexuality, marital status? Does he have problems? Does she want to be something different? Is she a robot, vampire, spaceman or ghost?” From many angles It is undeniably beautiful and picturesque – and for the purposes of this novel unspoiled by almost any crime having never had a murder case.

A Line to Kill is set just before the publication of The Word is Murder (the first in the series) and opens with Hawthorne and Horowitz being invited to speak at a literary festival on the tiny Channel Island of Alderney. Alderney is only three square miles in size, home to about 2,000 people, and has never had a murder… until the detective duo arrives. The novel is very much an homage to Agatha Christie, particularly the later Poirot novels, and she is mentioned both explicitly and implicitly, for example in a chapter title. Following Christie, Horowitz spends nearly a third of the narrative setting the scene for the murder: a small literary festival on a tiny island establishes a limited pool of suspects in a convincing manner; tensions concerning the construction of a Normandy-Alderney-Britain power line disturb the peace of an otherwise idyllic community; and a suitably obnoxious murder victim is presented in the form of Charles le Mesurier.

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Alderney is in turmoil over a planned power line that will cut through it, desecrating a war cemetery and turning neighbour against neighbour.

The sequence at the end of Live and Let Die (1954) when Bond is dragged over the coral reef is brilliant, says Horowitz. As his regular readers will know, however, Horowitz has none of Christie’s flaws as an author and there are no cardboard cut-out characters, wildly improbable murder methods, or cosy camouflaging of harsh realities of crime and harm here. Alderney does not have a standing police service and although officers from neighbouring Guernsey are flown in, they have little experience with violent crime themselves and it is only natural that they take advantage of Hawthorne’s extensive expertise by recruiting him as an unpaid consultant. Horowitz is a master of misdirection, and his brilliant self-portrayal, wittily self-deprecating, carries the reader through a jolly satire on the publishing world." — Booklist

Private Investigator Daniel Hawthorne and the writer Anthony Horowitz have been invited to a literary festival on the island of Alderney to talk about their new book . . . The setting on the island of Alderney – although it could, perhaps, have been a little more intense, a little more claustrophobic…. Very soon they discover that not all is as it should be. Alderney is in turmoil over a planned power line that will cut through it, desecrating a war cemetery and turning neighbour against neighbour.