The Word is Murder, Anthony Horowitz

Launched into listening to this on audio without really doing any blurb reading or background checking of any type. Basically grabbed it because we'd recently watched THE MAGPIE MURDERS which we'd loved, and, well it was there. 

One of those reinvention style novels, where the author has cast himself in the role of a "Watson" like character, although to equate Daniel Hawthorne with Sherlock Holmes might be a bit of a push. Still, there's nothing wrong with the development of a brilliant, eccentric, disgraced police detective as a character, and Horowitz seems quite a dab hand at coming up with these ideas. The portrayal of himself as the long-suffering, patient and somewhat dour sidekick also seems to work, although to be honest, in the audio version, it took me a while to cotton onto the central conceit. 

The plot is nicely twisty as well - starting out with a woman talking into a funeral parlor to plan her own funeral, only to be found, six hours later, strangled to death with the curtain cord in her own home. I can't really say that the likely perpetrator is that hard to pick, but the journey to discovering him, which involves an awful lot of relationshiop building and character development was most enjoyable, as is the pairing of this unlikely crime solving duo. As of the time of this review there are 5 books in total in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series. Will definitely be adding another to the listening queue, if for no other reason than to see how things continue to develop.