Close to Death (2024) is the fifth novel in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series. The series began with The Word is Murder (2017), which became an immediate bestseller.

Horowitz is a British novelist and screenwriter who works in a variety of genres. He started his career writing middle grade and young adult books and found success with his best-selling Alex Rider series, which features a 14-year-old boy who spies for MI6. Horowitz broke into the adult mystery genre in 2011 when Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate signed him to write the first new Sherlock Holmes novel, which he titled House of Silk (2011). In 2014, his Sherlock Holmes novel Moriarty was published, and he has also contributed to the James Bond franchise with Trigger Mortis (2015), Forever and a Day (2018), and With a Mind to Kill (2022). In addition, Horowitz is a prolific screenwriter; he is the creator and writer of Foyle’s War (2002), among others, and a contributor to Midsomer Murders (1997) and Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989). In 2022, Horowitz was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for service to literature.

This guide refers to the 2024 Harper Kindle edition of the novel.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss murder, death by suicide, domestic violence, racism, and racist violence.

Plot Summary

Close to Death has two separate timelines that alternate throughout the novel. One is told from the first-person point of view of Anthony Horowitz, which takes place in the present. The other timeline takes place five years in the past at Riverview Close and is written from an omniscient third-person point of view.

All the residents of the small, gated community of Riverview Close hear Giles Kenworthy come home at 4:00 am. His loud car disturbs Adam and Teri Strauss, Tom and Gemma Beresford, Andrew Pennington, May Winslow and Phyllis Moore, and Roderick and Felicity Browne. Giles and his family have disrupted the neighborhood since they moved in, and everyone is looking forward to the meeting that night, in which they will all be able to address their concerns directly with Giles and his wife, Lynda. However, when they meet that night, they receive a last-minute message from Giles saying that he and Lynda won’t be attending. The residents are angry and disappointed but not surprised.

Six weeks later, Giles is murdered, shot with a crossbow at his front door. All the neighbors are suspects, and Detective Superintendent (DS) Tariq Khan, the detective in charge, senses that they are keeping secrets. He calls in Daniel Hawthorne, an investigator who consults with the police force when they are faced with a difficult case. After interviewing the residents, Hawthorne and his partner, John Dudley, realize that Khan’s assessment is true—they are hiding something.

However, the residents are all very open about their frustrations with Giles and the fact that after he missed the meeting, their relationship with him worsened. His children broke one of Adam’s chess sets and rode their skateboards through Andrew’s garden. In addition, May and Phyllis suspect Giles of killing their dog, Ellery. The final straw, however, was the notice that the Kenworthys planned to build a swimming pool in their garden.

In the present timeline, Anthony Horowitz, the author of Close to Death, explains the circumstances behind writing the Riverview Close story. He has written four true crime novels in which he follows Hawthorne through an investigation and records his story. In this novel, Horowitz is writing about one of Hawthorne’s past cases. Because he wasn’t there, he must write this novel from the third-person point of view and collaborate more closely with Hawthorne, who was actually present.

Five years earlier, at Riverview Close, Hawthorne and Dudley continue to investigate Giles’s murder. Before they can come to any conclusions, Roderick Brown dies by suicide and leaves a letter that appears to confess his guilt of Giles’s murder. Roderick’s death is a classic “locked room mystery,” happening in his garage with no apparent way for a killer to escape. Along with the fact that the crossbow that killed Giles belonged to Roderick, this seems conclusive to DS Khan, and he closes the case.

Hawthorne believes that the real murderer framed Roderick for Giles’s death, and he and Dudley continue to investigate. However, they are confounded by the locked garage. The only possible exit is a skylight with screws that are rusted tight, as Khan tells them.

In the present timeline, Horowitz decides to embark on an investigation of his own—he wants to find out more about both the crime and Hawthorne’s partner, Dudley. He discovers the name of the security firm that Hawthorne works for and that Dudley might work for as well. When he visits the firm, he is warned off the case, but this just makes him more determined to find out the truth. He visits Riverview Close and talks to Andrew Pennington and Lynda Kenworthy, the only two people involved who still live there. Andrew offers a startling bit of information: Adam Strauss died just a few months after Roderick’s death. Lynda gives him DS Khan’s contact information, and after some persuading, Khan agrees to meet Horowitz.

Five years earlier, Hawthorne and Dudley interview Felicity, Roderick’s wife. When Hawthorne asks her about a second neighborhood meeting, she is surprised that he knows about it, as they had decided to keep it a secret. She didn’t go to the meeting, which happened the night before Giles’s death, and doesn’t know what happened. However, Roderick was upset when he came home, and she believes that whatever happened there holds the answer to the murders.

Hawthorne and Dudley gather the neighbors together, and they tell the story of their second meeting. That night, they had all drank too much and began to fantasize about killing Giles. Adam had admitted that he felt responsible for the Kenworthys, as he had formerly lived in their house and sold it to them when he moved to a smaller house in the neighborhood. They considered various methods, and Roderick brought up shooting Giles with his crossbow. As a joke, they even drew straws to decide who would do it, and Roderick drew the short straw. When the game was over, they all went home.

After hearing the story, Hawthorne and Dudley return to Roderick’s house. They climb up onto the roof to examine the skylight, the only possible exit point for a murderer. While on the roof, they notice that the Beresfords’ nanny can see the roof from her bedroom. Later, she tells them that she had gone to stay with a friend who’d been attacked the night before Giles died and wasn’t home the night of either murder.

Hawthorne calls DS Khan to Adam’s house. There, he reveals his solution: Adam killed both Giles and Roderick—he is a chess grandmaster, and his strategy skills came into play in his intricate plan. Hawthorne says that Adam killed his first wife, Wendy, and buried her in the Kenworthys’ garden, formerly his own. If the swimming pool were built, the tree would be removed, and his crime exposed.

Faced with these accusations, Adam produces postcards that seem to prove that Wendy is still alive, and he even calls Wendy and allows Khan to speak to her. With this evidence, Khan refuses to reopen the case. Hawthorne and Dudley know that they are right, and the “proof” of Wendy’s existence only means that Adam planned even further ahead than they thought, arranging for a woman to impersonate his first wife.

In the present timeline, Horowitz is disappointed at this ending. However, after finding out that Adam died months after the murder, he believes that Hawthorne may have killed the man. When Khan agrees to meet him and gives him Dudley’s address, Horowitz goes to meet Dudley. Even after five years, Dudley is certain that Hawthorne was right about everything and that justice was served with Adam’s death. Horowitz realizes that Hawthorne didn’t kill Adam—Dudley did. He thinks about confronting Hawthorne with the revelation but ultimately leaves the detective alone.