First off, Rory Kinnear does a fabulous job as the narrator of The Twist of a Knife. The story is told in the first person by the fictionalized Anthony Horowitz, so hopefully, I’ll never hear the real Horowitz speak, since I’ll expect Kinnear’s voice. Beyond that, though, he does all the characters’ voices well, inserting their personality and feelings into their dialogue.

When I first started this series, I wasn’t a fan of Horowitz inserting himself into the story as the detective’s sidekick, but I’ve changed my mind. The bits of his real-life intermingled with the fictional plot are fun. For example, he really did write a play called Mindgame that really was performed at the Vaudeville Theatre.

As the blurb states, Horowitz is the main suspect this time, accused of murdering a theater critic, and the evidence is mounting. Of course, he turns to Hawthorne, who takes the case. (He has his own reasons for doing so; it’s not just out of kindness.)

This is a pretty traditional mystery. We have an unlikable victim and several suspects, each with their own reason for wanting her dead. Hawthorne is our overly observant detective, the only one who is capable of putting all the disparate clues together. Horowitz works well as his sidekick, especially with his personal stake in the case being solved. The cops are pretty useless, having settled on Horowitz as the bad guy and apparently not looking any deeper.

It’s an engaging mystery with several twists and turns. I tend to enjoy the theater as a setting, too, and the Vaudeville and the cast and crew were fun. I also loved how Hawthorne staged the denoument and why.