Richard Pryce, lawyer of very important people, appears at his home, beaten to death with a bottle of 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild wine valued at 2'000£. A few days earlier, the famous feminist author Akira Anno had publicly threatened to do something like this to him. But the situation is complicated, with several suspects and a new dead man, a friend of the victim. Hawthorne, a former cop and collaborator with the crime squad on hard-to-solve murder cases, has to step in and, with him, the author, Anthony Horowitz, who is going to write a book about the case when it is solved. After The Word is Murder, this would be the second in a trilogy for which he claims to have a contract with his publisher. The relationship between the two has frequent ups and downs and arguments, with mutual appreciation and distrust.
It is a work in the style of the English crime novel, with express references to Sherlock-Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple..... Although there are characters with faults and misconduct, the narrative does not confuse right and wrong, and the author avoids, in general, immoral descriptions.