Anthony Horowitz Books in Order

Anthony Horowitz is the only writer who has been officially hired to continue both Sherlock Holmes and James Bond - and the only crime novelist who casts himself as the sidekick. His shelf runs from a 1986 comic noir about a boy detective through the Alex Rider empire to the Hawthorne mysteries, in which a fictional Anthony Horowitz tags along writing the book you are holding. Two of his series - the Hawthorne books and the Susan Ryeland mysteries around Magpie Murders - are among the most acclaimed detective fiction of the last decade, and both play structural games with the novel itself: a book within a book, a manuscript with pages missing, a writer implicated in his own plot. This page maps all of it: which series are ordered, which stand alone, and where the tricks are (1986–present).

Where to start

Magpie Murders (2016) for adult readers - the celebrated book-within-a-book that made his literary reputation - or Stormbreaker (2000) for the Alex Rider door into the biggest YA spy shelf in print. Both are clean entry points; nothing in either requires the other.

Does the reading order matter?

Three ordered series, everything else standalone. Hawthorne: The Word Is Murder (2017) through Close to Death (2024), with a sixth announced for 2026 - read in order, the narrator's relationship is the arc. Susan Ryeland: Magpie Murders (2016), Moonflower Murders (2020), Marble Hall Murders (2025) - same rule, and the PBS adaptation follows the books exactly. Alex Rider: fourteen books from Stormbreaker (2000), with its own reading guide. The Sherlock Holmes novels (The House of Silk, 2011; Moriarty, 2014) pair with any Holmes; the Bond novels (Trigger Mortis, 2015; Forever and a Day, 2018) slot between Fleming titles. The Power of Five ran five books, 2005-2012, and is complete. The Diamond Brothers, from The Falcon's Malteser (1986), is the comic line that started everything.

Which one is the best?

Magpie Murders (2016) is the modern classic - the structural trick that made his name twice; The Word Is Murder (2017) opened the meta-mysteries; Stormbreaker (2000) remains the YA gold standard; and Oblivion (2012) closed Power of Five at full blast.

Related guides

Readers finishing this shelf usually want the map next door: Alex Rider books in order, Agatha Christie books in order, Hercule Poirot books in order. Every guide follows the same format — the shelf, the entry point, the honest answer about order.

Make it a project

Pick a session size and let the days accumulate — at the pace our reading speed test measures, most shelves above clear in a few weeks of half-hours. Every guide on the books in order shelf follows this same format, and when a book lands, its 8-question quiz is waiting on the original book quiz.