They’re making a major feature film of the first Hawthorne/Horowitz mystery novel. Except—they’re behind schedule, they’ve run out of money and . . . oh! The star has just been murdered. Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne is dead. Or, rather, the actor playing him in the film adaptation of The Word is Murder is. Rising star David Caine has been stabbed, and it seems that everyone on the set had a motive. Caine had just fired his PA. He had fallen out with his director, slept with the screenwriter, humiliated his co-star and dropped his agent days before he was about to sign a multi-million-dollar deal to appear in the next Spider-Man movie. But what if Caine’s murderer had made a mistake? What if it was the real Hawthorne who was the intended victim? For it turns out that the brilliant detective may have got it wrong ten years earlier. An innocent man has died in jail. And perhaps someone has decided that Hawthorne must pay the price. From the film set on the south coast of England, the story moves to Reeth, in Yorkshire, the village where Hawthorne grew up. A burned-down school, a car accident that isn’t what it seems, blackmail and murder in an Elizabethan country house . . . somehow they combine to unlock the secret of what has happened in Hastings. For once, the local police are helpful. DS Sarah Milnes gives Hawthorne carte blanche to investigate and there may even be a hint of romance in the air. Which leaves his hapless sidekick, Horowitz, on his own, stumbling his way to the truth. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, A Deadly Episode is an intriguing page-turner that once again demonstrates why Anthony Horowitz is the reigning king of the modern whodunit.

If you like period pieces and murder-mysteries with a twist of romance, you will enjoy this book. The protagonist becomes the chief suspect in the murder of Sir Geoffrey Kynaston and must clear his name. Set in Victorian England, there are flashbacks to Italy. Filled with aristocrats, there are colorful characters, too, lending an air of the Dickensian comic relief, ― like the money-obsessed private sleuth. E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was an enormously popular and prolific writer of suspense fiction and romance. Notably easy to read, Mr. Oppenheim has few equals among modern English novelists. He is untiring in the invention of mysterious plots, he is a clever weaver of the plausible with the sensational, and he has the necessary gift of facile narrative. (Boston Transcript.) He is a master of the art of telling a story. He has humor, a keen sense of the dramatic, and a knack of turning out a happy ending just when the complications of the plot threaten worse disasters. (New York Times.)

Ten short stories. Miss Mott is a newspaper columnist, offering advice to readers on various personal matters. Is she now to become a consultant on crime? Of course, her uncle does work at Scotland Yard...In the ten cases, Lucie Mott solves only two-inding a missing woman locked in her own house and recognizing that an apparently philandering husband was actually out thieving--and in a third helps rescue her uncle. In five stories she is saved from her own folly by a supposed criminal known as Violet Joe with whom she immediately falls in love. Three strains of action are interwoven throughout the volume: the romance of Lucie and Violet Joe, the maniacal attraction of the criminal gang leader Meredith for Lucie, and Miss Mott's investigative career. All are neatly tied up in the final case.