I like the Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery Series detectives for their predictability. Horowitz, as usual, will make himself look ridiculous, Hawthorne will hide everything about himself, and I won't guess who the killer is, as usual.

In The Twist of a Knife, Horowitz (author and protagonist in the same person) experiences a joyous and exciting event: the premiere of his play. The Sunday Times critic Harriet Throsby trashes the play and Horowitz himself, and the next day she is found dead with a dagger through her heart. And the dagger belongs to Horowitz. How does the writer get out of this mess?

The fact that the story revolves around the premiere allows the author to sprinkle in a lot of interesting facts about the theatre backstage, which I was excited about. The real Horowitz's play Mindgame was indeed once staged at the Vaudeville Theater in London, so he knows what he is writing about.

The book Horowitz has an interesting conversation about representation and cultural appropriation with one of the characters, a Native American actor. If Horowitz, a white cisgender author, creates a Native American character based on a real figure, would that count as cultural appropriation? On the one hand, it's ridiculous, but on the other hand, Twitter scandals have erupted for more minor reasons.

"We've already agreed that I can't write about Ahmet or Pranav. So presumably I can't write about Maureen or Sky either ... because they're both women! Or Lucky because he's a dog! At the end of the day, if I listened to you, I'd only write about myself! A book full of middle-aged white writers describing middle-aged white writers being murdered by middle-aged white writers!"

All in all a great book for a cozy read for a couple of evenings.