Neighbors. If they aren’t blasting their radio at 4 a.m. or blocking your driveway, they’re cutting down trees or letting their kids ride their skateboards over your flowerbed. Disagreements between neighbors don’t usually lead to murder, though, unless you live in Florida or are a character in the fifth installment of the Hawthorne & Horowitz mystery series by Anthony Horowitz.
Close to Death centers on a gated neighborhood called Riverview Close, comprising just six homes. Five of the households get along splendidly, but the newest residents, the Kentworthy family, appear to be the neighbors from hell. When Giles Kentworthy fails to show up for a neighborhood meeting, scheduled specifically to address the “challenges” people are having with his behavior, things escalate. Six weeks later, Kentworthy is found dead, a crossbow bolt shot through his neck. Everyone had a motive–the same motive, in fact. Clearly, someone got fed up with Kentworthy and decided to solve the problem for everyone.
In this installment, Horowitz changes up the format a bit from his previous four books. Rather than following former police detective Daniel Hawthorne on a current case (even in London, interesting murder mysteries don’t just pop up every week), Anthony talks Hawthorne into letting him write about an earlier case–one he mentioned taking place in a gated community. Hawthorne is reluctant, saying he doesn’t like how that case ended, but Horowitz is facing a deadline and pushes hard to write about it. Always one to be in control, Hawthorne agrees but insists on giving Anthony the information piece-meal and refuses to tell him the solution up front.
I enjoyed this different format. It allowed for some of the usual Hawthorne-Horowitz interaction while minimizing the amount of time Anthony the character plays a dimwit, which can get a little old. As Hawthorne says, “I know you’ve been out with me a few times and you’ve never noticed a thing. In fact, you’ve helped the killers more than you’ve helped me.” Additionally, we get a new character in John Dudley, Hawthorne’s former assistant. Dudley seems to be a sharp detective and gets on well with Hawthorne, so Anthony is curious about why they aren’t working together anymore. Hawthorne is reticent on this topic and cuts off Anthony’s attempts to learn more. Dudley is a fun character, complementing Hawthorne’s abrasiveness with more of a classic smart-ass detective style (in response to a character being found dead with a Tesco bag over his head, Dudley muses, “I had him down as more of a Waitrose sort of guy.”). I’m hoping we see this character again in future installments.
This set up also allows Horowitz to ponder one of the key points that most mystery fans must surely have wondered from time to time: “At what point does the detective solve the crime? It’s a remarkable coincidence that he or she only seems to arrive at the solution in the last couple of chapters, but it’s always made clear that the main clues, the ones that gave the whole thing away, turned up long before. Sitting there on the balcony of my flat, with the water trickling down the wall, it quite amused me to put Hawthorne on the spot. At this point, how much had he worked out?”
There’s only one scene in Close to Death where I rolled my eyes at Anthony’s silliness: Frustrated that Hawthorne won’t share more information about John Dudley or the solution to the Close mystery, Anthony tracks down (rather cleverly, he thinks) the consulting firm that Hawthorne sometimes works through. This is a high-powered firm, and Anthony is immediately out of his depth. The sinister CEO offers to tell him the solution to the murder, and after a few seconds of pondering whether he would want to be indebted to this person, Anthony says, “All right, tell me.”
Part of me thinks this is a brilliant move from a storytelling perspective, giving the reader the apparent solution to the case almost exactly halfway through the novel. On the other hand, Anthony, Anthony, you twit. You used the internet to find this guy, but you never thought of googling the case? Perhaps he was trying to remain true to his tacit agreement with Hawthorne and he just gave in to a moment of weakness. Or maybe Horowitz just really enjoys making fictional Anthony look like a fool.
That one eye roll aside, I was thoroughly entertained by this novel. Though I enjoy the series as a whole, I’d been mildly disappointed by the last couple of installments, because I was able to work out the killer, and I like to be hoodwinked. This mystery had me shifting my guess every chapter, unable to pinpoint which of the cast of neighbors would be most likely to commit murder. Horowitz plays with murder tropes, dropping hints and references to other famous novels, completely leading me down the well-manicured garden path. And when the solution is revealed, I smacked myself in the head and said, “Of course! That’s so obvious.”
This is a fun mystery, and I’m not trying to reach for deeper meaning, but I appreciated the subtext of what it means to be a neighbor. These people weren’t friends exactly, just people whom geography forced together and who got along okay. Did one person disrupt the harmony? Honestly, they didn’t all seem like the greatest of neighbors when you look at it. . .the kindly old ladies, for instance, let their dog run amok. Could someone really be driven to murder by a bad neighbor? As one character says, “There’s nothing special about Riverview Close, you know. I’d say there isn’t a street in England where the neighbours don’t have disputes.”
Indeed. How many of those lead to murder?