Literature / Close to Death

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Close to Death is a 2024 mystery novel by Anthony Horowitz. It is the fifth book in Horowitz's series about the brilliant fictional private detective, Daniel Hawthorne, and Hawthorne's clueless bumbling sidekick...Anthony Horowitz. Or rather, Horowitz's Author Avatar.

Only this time, Anthony Horowitz isn't tagging along as The Watson to Hawthorne, because this book is about one of Hawthorne's old cases. Anthony has a deadline for his next True Crime Daniel Hawthorne book, but unfortunately, Hawthorne does not have a suitable case going at the moment for he and Anthony to investigate. Hawthorne, rather reluctantly, suggests a past case that he has already solved: the Giles Kenworthy case.

Back in 2014, hedge fund manager Giles Kenworthy was murdered in his home, in a six-house gated community called Riverview Close, a crossbow arrow fired straight into his throat. As it turns out, Kenworthy was the sort of unpleasant neighbor everyone dislikes. May and Phyllis, the two little old ladies who live in one of the houses, believe Kenworthy killed their dog. Tom Beresford, a doctor, blames Kenworthy for the death of one of his patients—Kenworthy's car was blocking the driveway, which delayed Tom's exit. Adam Strauss, a chess grandmaster, blames Kenworthy's young sons for destroying a priceless chess set when they hit a cricket ball through Strauss's window. Andrew Pennington, a widower, thinks Kenworthy's children rode their skateboards through the flowers Andrew planted as a memorial for his late wife. Roderick Browne, a dentist, is horrified at Kenworthy's plans to build a pool and jacuzzi in his backyard, as that will ruin the view of Browne's wife, Felicity, an invalid who spends all day in bed.

Is any of that a motive for murder? Or was the killing due to something completely different, like how Giles Kenworthy's wife Lydia was cheating on him? Or what about Sarah, the gardener, who is obviously up to something?

Hawthorne, as always, is highly secretive, doling out information in bits and pieces, telling Anthony that he solved the case but refusing to say who did it. A frustrated Anthony starts asking questions of his own. He has questions about both the case and Hawthorne's own Mysterious Past, and also about the even more mysterious John Dudley, another ex-police officer and Hawthorne's assistant on the Kenworthy investigation.

Tropes:

• Ambiguous Ending: While Hawthorne’s summation feels correct, much of his final accusation of Strauss is never proven. Nobody ever actually digs up the magnolia tree to check for a body, and they never prove the woman he calls wasn’t Wendy. The reader is asked to take Hawthorne’s word for it, and the various oddities surrounding Roderick Browne’s death suggest he’s correct, but the reader is left to question if he was right or if Strauss really was innocent. It's also not entirely clear if Strauss was then murdered by Hawthorne (as the police obviously believe) or by John Dudley (as Horowitz believes); both of them have a history of such vigilante actions (Dudley assaulted Terrence Stagg, Hawthorne assaulted Derek Abbott and later goaded him into killing himself), so either one of them could easily have it in them to do something like that. They also could have both done it together, or it could have really been a Contrived Coincidence accident Dudley and Hawthorne each suspect each other of.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Giles Kenworthy, who is a thoughtless, inconsiderate neighbor who angers the other residents of the cul-de-sac until they actually talk about killing him. Also kind of racist, and an adulterer. Partially subverted later when it's revealed that some of the uglier things Kenworthy did, like killing the dog or destroy the flower bed, actually were done by the murderer as part of the plot to frame him and ensure that Everyone Is a Suspect.
  • Also, the husbands of May and Phyllis, whom they described as abusive, and whom they murdered.
• Author Avatar: As usual, Anthony Horowitz appearing in his own novel. The main difference is that in this one he's offscreen for roughly half the book, the other half describing the original investigation in third person.
• Bad to the Last Drop: Anthony tastes grounds in the too-strong coffee that Andrew Pennington makes, but drinks it anyway.
• Blackmail: How Sarah Baines the ex-con got the job as a gardener at Riverview Close. She knew that May and Phyllis, pretending to be ex-nuns and harmless old ladies, are really ex-cons themselves who served long prison sentences for murdering their husbands.
• Bumbling Sidekick: Subverted with Dudley. He is presented as more amateurish than his boss in the earlier flashback scenes/chapter rough drafts, but Anthony is writing those based on secondhand reports and his own speculative artistic license. Once Hawthorne reads those chapters, he angrily says that Dudley was actually a Hyper-Competent Sidekick that made some of the observations Anthony credited Horowitz with.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: The third person narration mentions the "ample breast" of Sarah Baines, who is then described as "strikingly attractive."
• Carpet of Virility: Anthony is startled by the "chest hair and medallion" of Jean-Francois, Lydia's French lover.
• The Chessmaster: Adam Strauss is a literal version of this. Also the figurative version of this as well, manipulating the people of the close like pieces on a chessboard as part of his murder plot.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Phyllis, jittery about the murder investigation, says "I need a burner!", and proceeds to roll her own cigarette. This is an early hint that Phyllis and May aren't what they seem.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Many references to past events in the Hawthorne series, like how Anthony was arrested for the murder of Harriet Throsby in Hawthorne #4, A Twist of the Knife.
  • The third and fourth Hawthorne novels both contain passing references to an old case of his, a murder in a residential neighborhood called Riverside Close. This, the fifth novel, is that case (though the name is changed to "Riverview Close", which is handwaved as Hawthorne telling Anthony the wrong name to stop him from looking it up).
• Conversational Troping: The change to the formula, with Anthony Horowitz in the Framing Device explaining how he's writing his book as he learns about the cold case, results in a lot of this.
  • Anthony talks about Point of View and how switching from first-person (what he'd used for the first four Hawthorne books, since he was describing events he observed himself), to third-person (for describing events of five years ago) forces him to basically invent inner thoughts for his characters.
  • Anthony even uses the term Chekhov's Gun while explaining to Hawthorne how he took care to mention the crossbow in Roderick Browne's garage, but only as one of several items amongst the clutter.
  • Anthony says he dislikes the Locked Room Mystery trope as it tends to overwhelm the rest of the story. (Naturally, the second murder is a locked-room mystery.)
  • May and Phyllis run a specialty bookshop called The Tea Cosy that sells only Cozy Mysteries. They specifically tell Hawthorne that they dislike the blood, gore, and sex usually found in modern-day mystery novels.
  • Anthony talks about Never One Murder in the context of True Crime—how it's no big deal if multiple people get killed off in an Agatha Christie book, but since he is writing true crime it's not that easy because there aren't that many murders in England and most of them aren't book worthy.
• Crazy-Prepared: Not only did Adam kill his first wife Wendy and get away with it, he went to extraordinary lengths to conceal it if anybody like Hawthorne connected the dots. Strauss is sending fake alimony payments (he gets them back), and has a woman in Hong Kong staged and ready to pretend to be Wendy Strauss if anyone calls, like DS Khan does. Hawthorne is left muttering about how Adam the chess grandmaster was plotting "ten moves ahead."
• Crime After Crime: Adam Strauss murdered his first wife and buried her under the magnolia tree. Years later, Giles Kenworthy was going to dig a swimming pool on that spot which would lead to the body being discovered, so to stop that happening, he killed Kenworthy. He needed a scapegoat, so he killed Roderick Browne and staged it as a suicide after manipulating him into writing a letter implicating himself in the murder. But to do that, he needed to get rid of the Beresford's nanny, who would be in a position to see him leaving the crime scene, so he assaulted the old woman she was taking care of so she'd have to take the night off to look after her. He also staged an assault on himself that same day to give himself a Disability Alibi just in case someone got suspicious.
• Deadly Gas: Roderick Browne died from nitrous oxide piped into a plastic bag placed over his head.
• Death by Falling Over: Adam Strauss died six months after the Riverview Close murders, falling off a hotel balcony. It turns out to have been a Vigilante Execution.
• Dies Wide Open: "His eyes were still wide open in shock" as Hawthorne, Dudley, and the cops gaze down on Giles Kenworthy's corpse.
• Disability Alibi: Hawthorne and Dudley work out that the murderer would have had to climb through Roderick Browne's skylight after killing him, which rules out Adam Strauss (who had a leg injury) and May and Phyllis (too old) as physically incapable. Subverted in Adam's case; he was faking his injury.
• Everybody Did It: Discussed Trope. It turns out that May and Phyllis got the idea to kill Giles Kenworthy like this after selling two copies of the Trope Maker novel, Murder on the Orient Express. The murder actually did not happen this way, as no one in the neighborhood was really willing to go that far—except for the actual killer, who started that conversation to cover his tracks.
• Everyone Is a Suspect: Everybody living in Riverview Close had a reason to hate Giles Kenworthy, though whether that hatred could extend to murder is unclear.
• Exact Words: Roderick Browne's suicide note mentions that he did something "very stupid", that he didn't want Felicity to see what would happen, and that he hoped to see her "on the other side". However, it doesn't actually mention suicide or murder. That's because it's not a suicide note. Browne expected to be arrested and prosecuted for the murder, the "stupid thing" was publicly saying he wanted to murder Kenworthy, and "the other side" referred to being released from police custody.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: After Roderick Browne's death, the mostly close-knit old friends and neighbors at Riverview Close went their separate ways. His wife Felicity stayed with her sister, the Beresfords moved away, as did May and Phyllis, and Adam Strauss fell to his death from a balcony six months after the murders. Andrew Pennington is the only resident left—except for Lydia Kenworthy, still in the house where her husband was murdered.
• Finally Found the Body: Subverted. Hawthorne deduces that Wendy Strauss did not divorce her husband and move back to Hong Kong: in fact Adam killed her and planted the magnolia tree over the burial spot. However, DS Khan falls for Adam's story and the woman who turns out to be impersonating Wendy, so the body is not found and is still under the tree, Adam and Teri having gotten away with murder.
• Framing Device: Anthony Horowitz, researching a new book in 2019, looks into an old Daniel Hawthorne case.
• Glasses Pull: When Anthony asks Andrew Pennington directly if he thought Roderick really killed Giles Kenworthy and himself, Pennington "took off his glasses and wiped them... then put them back on" before answering that yes, he still thinks Roderick committed a Murder-Suicide.
• History with Celebrity: Roderick Browne is a "dentist to the stars" who caters to a celebrity clientele. There's a picture of Roderick with Ewan McGregor in his waiting room, and another character mentions meeting McGregor there.
• Holding Both Sides of the Conversation: Andrew says he heard Adam and Roderick saying goodbye to each other as Adam left Roderick's house. In fact Roderick had already been drugged into unconsciousness and Adam is using an iPhone recording to fake a conversation.
• Inspector Lestrade: DS Khan, the investigating officer on the Kenworthy murder, who falls for all the red herrings and draws all the wrong conclusions. He is one of the more antagonistic sort, calling Hawthorne in with reluctance and taking petty pleasure in firing Hawthorne when the case appears to be closed. In the framing device, Khan meets with Anthony and threatens legal action if Anthony's book is too unflattering.
• Karma Houdini:
  • While Adam Strauss died six months after the murders in a Vigilante Execution, his wife Teri, a co-conspirator (even if Adam did the actual killing), gets away with nothing worse than a broken heart.
  • John Dudley has one in his backstory, explaining why he left the Bristol Police. His wife was killed by a distracted driver, who managed to beat the charges in court. After the acquittal, the driver celebrated with his friends outside the courthouse. Dudley broke the man's jaw and beat the piss out of his other friends, barely avoiding criminal charges himself.
• Kick the Dog: May and Phyllis' dog was killed by being thrown down the well after leaving one too many turds on the Kenworthy's lawn. Everyone suspects that Giles Kenworthy had Sarah Baines kill him. It was actually Adam Strauss, who killed the dog to make sure May and Phyllis had a motive to kill Kenworthy.
• Locked Room Mystery: The death of Roderick Browne, which DS Khan writes off as a suicide after the victim is found dead inside a locked car which itself is inside a locked garage, with the key to the car in Browne's pocket, the overhead door bolted on the inside, and the key for the door from the house to the garage in the keyhole on the wrong side. It turns out that Adam Strauss got out through the skylight, which he later glued shut to make it seem that the bolts had rusted, and poured water on the car, which activated the rain sensor and caused the windows to automatically shut.
• Lonely Bachelor Pad: Andrew Pennington is a retired widower, not a bachelor, but the principle is the same. The narration says "It was immediately obvious that he lived alone. The house had a sense of emptiness."
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Adam fell off a balcony in his hotel room six months after getting away with the murders. It was ruled an accident, but in reality it was a Vigilante Execution by either Hawthorne or Dudley.
• Manipulative Bastard: Adam Strauss expertly manipulates all of his neighbors into creating a situation where he can get away with murder.
• Mythology Gag: As Anthony's part of the story begins, he is putting the finishing touches on the fourth Daniel Hawthorne book, which he is calling Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre. His agent Hilda Starke says she doesn't like that title, and that Hawthorne has suggested "a much better one." The fourth Daniel Hawthorne novel was published as A Twist of the Knife.
• Never One Murder: Not only is there a murder after the one that kicks off the investigation, it turns out there was a murder before that one as well. Not to mention two other murders that happened in the past lives of two characters. The murderer himself is also possibly murdered a few months later.
• Never Suicide: Roderick Browne is found dead in his garage with what appears to be a suicide note, but Hawthorne doesn't buy it. Sure enough, it was a carefully planned murder in order to pin the Kenworthy murder on Roderick.
• Not the First Victim: And in fact, that first victim is the reason for the second and third victims. Adam Strauss and his wife Wendy didn't get divorced; he killed her and buried her where the magnolia tree now grows on the property. He killed Giles Kenworthy because the pool Giles wanted to install would have resulted in workers digging up the body.
• Obfuscating Disability: Adam Strauss is dismissed as a likely suspect because he was wearing a cast after spraining his ankle in a fall down some stairs. He intentionally fell down the stairs and faked the injury.
• Overly Nervous Flop Sweat: "There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead" as Roderick Browne frantically denies any part of the murder. Detective Superintendent Khan takes this as a sure sign that he's guilty.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Not for the first time in the series, Daniel Hawthorne, who is generally a decent sort even if he is taciturn and antisocial, makes a bigoted comment. When he wonders if Teri used "her oriental brain" to come up with the plan, she calls him a racist. He shoots back "Better a racist than a murderer." But again, this may have been an intentional choice of words to agitate the suspect.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Giles Kenworthy was a supporter of the right-wing UK Independence Party (not every party supporter is racist, but many associated politicians have used racist language) and when Andrew Pennington comes over to welcome him to the neighborhood, Kenworthy doesn't even say hello, but immediately assumes that this Black man at his doorstep must be the man delivering his new barbeque cooker.
• Pun-Based Title: Close to Death, punning on the word "close" to describe a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood, like Riverview Close, as well as the fact that everyone there was, well, close to death. (This pun might be missed by Americans, who would call that sort of dead-end street a cul-de-sac.)
• Race Fetish: Adam Strauss's first wife Wendy and second wife Teri were both Chinese—and in fact they are cousins. (This turns out to be a bit of subtle Foreshadowing of the ending.)
• Red Herring:
  • One of the things that leads Hawthorne to conclude that Roderick Browne didn't kill himself was the fact that his cell phone was missing. While Roderick in fact didn't kill himself, it's revealed that Sarah stole the phone after the fact, because she's been sending him nude photos.
  • Lydia Kenworthy seems to have continued her relationship with the 'French teacher', who turns out to have medaled at the 2012 London Olympics. His event? Archery. But he has nothing to do with the murder.
• Revisiting the Cold Case: Sort of. Hawthorne points Anthony to an old case, since he has nothing active—but the case was already solved, although Hawthorne is reluctant to tell Anthony how.
• Series Continuity Error: When Hawthorne offers this story to Anthony in A Twist of the Knife, he says the victim was "hammered to death in a posh cul-de-sac" named Riverside Close. In this book the victim was shot by a crossbow in Riverview Close. It's handwaved that Hawthorne got the details wrong on purpose because he didn't want Anthony to know too much about his past.
• Shout-Out: There's no way Anthony Horowitz naming characters Tom Beresford and Andrew Pennington could be a coincidence.
• The Snark Knight: Dudley, who is often tossing off snarky comments. When Pennington refuses to believe that the Kenworthys killed Ellery the dog, Dudley says "What did it do then? Commit suicide?"
• Switching P.O.V.: The opening chapters are each told from the POV of one of the suspects. The rest of the book bounces back between third-person POV following Hawthorne in 2014, and first-person from Anthony in 2019 as he writes his book.
• Take That!: Dudley says he never liked The Lord Of The Rings. "Hobbits and talking trees? Not for me, thanks." This is a subtle Call-Back to Hawthorne #1, The Word Is Murder, when Hawthorne criticizes the movies to Peter Jackson's face and specifically says he didn't like the Ents.
• Tattooed Crook: Sarah Baines, as Hawthorne figures out when he recognizes her tattoos as prison tats rather than professionally done tattoos.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: The judge who sentenced Phyllis felt that her killing of her abusive husband was brutal enough to sentence her to over a decade in prison, but since it wasn't premeditated and was brought on by abuse, he held that she could still inherit the couple's joint assets when she got out.
• A True Story in My Universe: The conceit for the entire Hawthorne series; in this one Anthony muses at length at the difficulties presented by writing "True Crime". Horowitz keeps this up all the way to the acknowledgments where he talks about how "Hawthorne and I sat down" to talk about the Kenworthy murder. (There's still the legally required This Is a Work of Fiction disclaimer buried at the end.)
• Uptown Girl: Lydia Kenworthy met Giles when she was working as a flight attendant for British Airways, and he was a first-class passenger.
• Vigilante Execution: The police suspect Hawthorne of murdering Adam Strauss, whom Hawthorne fingered for the Riverview Close murders, but can't prove it. It turns out that 1) Hawthorne was right and 2) it was Dudley who killed Strauss.