The Lake House by Kate Morton and the Hawthorne/Horowitz Mystery Series

 I’ve had a wonderful week in reading. I’ve also been struggling to downsize my overflowing abundance of books, sending box after box to the library for their upcoming book sale. In the course of searching for books “to dispose of” (how my blood curdles to utter that deathly phrase!), I have discovered some books I’m so eager to read. Who knew that they were there? This is the tale of a librarian totally out of touch with her collection.

I excavated a beautiful hardcover copy of The Lake House by Kate Morton, a book published and purchased in 2015. How well I remember how busy I was that year. No wonder I bought it, hoping for calmer times and a coming respite, which did not come, not that year or the next, which explains how it became forgotten until now. 

 Kate Morton is one of my favorite authors. Although she lives in Brisbane, Australia, many of her books are set in England. She also sets a number of her books in Australia. Her first book was The House at Riverton, published in 2007. I finally read it in 2022, and agree that Morton’s later books are better, more multi-faceted, more layered, with sweeping, enchanting plots. The Secret Keeper held me in thrall from start to finish, and my current reading of The Lake House has been just the same. Set in Cornwall and London, mostly between the years 1911 to 2003, the story revolves around the life, circumstances, and tragedies of a family, mostly focusing on three sisters and their mother. What makes this plot different is that a detective constable, Sadie Sparrow, revives a cold case involving the family. She is on leave from the police, due to her faulty judgement on a recent case. But this is only one part of this spell-binding novel. 

I’m also reading The Word is Murder (2018), the first in the Hawthorne/Horowitz series by Anthony Horowitz. When I learned last Tuesday that the 6^th book in the series has just been published, I investigated and discovered that Horowitz the author makes himself the “Watson” character to the Holmesian member of the duo,  Daniel Hawthorne. I'm sure that some mystery writer has done this sort of thing before, but this is the first time I've seen it done, and I'm intrigued by that aspect. I’ve noticed on Goodreads that the ratings for each book in the series increase(s) with each book. The only reason I’m giving this series a try is that I loved Horowitz’s The Marble Hall Murders. I really didn’t know much about Anthony Horowitz’s books before that, and didn’t know that he was the creative force behind Foyle’s War (public television series). Have you read anything by Horowitz?