Oh my god this book was so much fun! I thought Anthony Horowitz’s other novel (Magpie Murders) was meta, but this goes above and beyond!
Okay, let me see if I can sum this plot up correctly without TOO much confusion: Diana Cowper, mother of a famous actor, walks into a funeral parlor and arranges her own funeral. Then she goes home, and someone murders her (gasp!) — that’s our murder mystery. But then there’s a detective named Daniel Hawthorne. He wants a ghostwriter to write his life story — he envisions himself as the grumpy but brilliant investigator solving crimes in a series of novels. So he hires…Anthony Horowitz. Who wrote this book.
(Hawthorne gets some great lines, by the way: “But the thing is, you see -and to be honest, I don’t like to mention this- I’m a bit short. There just aren’t enough people getting murdered.”)
Horowitz writes himself in as a character, and does so brilliantly. Remember Stephen King in the last Dark Tower novel? Yeah…way better than that (love you Uncle Steve!). I kept googling stuff to see what might actually be real. He tries to get to know Hawthorne, who does not want to be known, he just wants to solve cases with an audience. But he is so OBVIOUSLY hiding something. Together, they investigate the twists and turns of Cowper’s murder — the beginning at the funeral parlor really sets up a great case. And Horowitz leaves the book open to a second, so it looks like Hawthorne will get his wish after all!