what elevates this series above many if not all of its competitors is Horowitz’s self-deprecating representation of himself in his narration (Watson was a fictionalisation of Doyle) and the relationship between him and Hawthorne, which (in contrast to Watson’s reverence for Holmes) is fraught with friction .

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). Dark secrets emerge and the list of suspects grows--will Daniel and Anthony uncover who's behind the carnage before the killer strikes again? The clearer focus: the previous two novels – if I remember rightly – have both twisted towards the thriller genre by the conclusion as Horowitz blunders into the path of dangerous people and is nearly killed. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and so, like Watson in Sherlock Holmes, he is usually wrong and always gets himself into trouble. Insisting he loves all his writing, Horowitz admits a partiality for the Alex Rider books, which has helped a whole generation find literature, books and reading.On foreign soil, “officially and legally” they cannot gather evidence, question witnesses, or make arrests. Then there’s Charles le Mesurier, the online-gaming entrepreneur bankrolling the event, a wealthy and boorish figure who patronizes or taunts most of the men he meets and, though married, puts the moves on every pretty woman.

But he faces a serious setback when a second murder spurs Deputy Chief Officer Jonathan Torode of Guernsey Crime Services to identify a culprit Hawthorne agrees is highly plausible. On the television front Horowitz says, Magpie Murders has been adapted into a six-episode series with Lesley Manville as the editor Susan Ryeland and Tim McMullan as Atticus Pünd, the detective in the book within the book. The other luminaries invited to the tiny island include blind psychic Elizabeth Lovell, TV chef Marc Bellamy, war historian George Elkin, children’s franchiser Anne Cleary, and French performance poet Maïssa Lamar.

This series is so ingenious, putting himself into the story as the detectives sidekick is a new one for me but it works so well. Given its size, Alderney had a shockingly high number of slave labourers – 6,000 – many of whom were worked to death. For the reader, the unfolding is like unwrapping a present that has been concealed in multiple layers. A somewhat eclectic mix and Horowitz places this motley crew in an isolated location which is itself riven with political tension as a plan to run an electrical power line through the island to connect France and England. Horowitz sums up the rest of the event’s participants: “an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet.