The Devil’s Due (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #3) by Bonnie MacBird Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #3
Pages: 384
Published by Harper Collins on October 10, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
After Art in the Blood and Unquiet Spirits, Holmes and Watson are back in the third of Bonnie MacBird’s critically acclaimed Sherlock Holmes Adventures, written in the tradition of Conan Doyle himself.
It’s 1890 and the newly famous Sherlock Holmes faces his worst adversary to date – a diabolical villain bent on destroying some of London’s most admired public figures in particularly gruesome ways. A further puzzle is that suicide closely attends each of the murders. As he tracks the killer through vast and seething London, Holmes finds himself battling both an envious Scotland Yard and a critical press as he follows a complex trail from performers to princes, anarchists to aesthetes. But when his brother Mycroft disappears, apparently the victim of murder, even those loyal to Holmes begin to wonder how close to the flames he has travelled. Has Sherlock Holmes himself made a deal with the devil?
My Review:
Two competing quotations ran through my brain as I read this third entry in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series, quotes that could not be further apart if they tried. One is the famous and often misquoted, mistranslated and/or misappropriated quote from the French writer, journalist and critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, who wrote in 1849, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. In English, that’s the more familiar, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” and it’s a phrase that Holmes and Watson would have been well familiar with.
The other quote is considerably later, and is also frequently misquoted and misappropriated. “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain!” As Montgomery Scott commented, or will, in 2286.
Together, those quotes encapsulate The Devil’s Due in some rather surprising ways.
On the surface, this is very much a classic mystery conundrum, as a serial killer is stalking London. One that it seems that only Sherlock Holmes recognizes as such. The police, in the person of the odious new Commissioner Titus Billings, are MORE than willing to take the various rulings of accidents and suicides at face value. Then again, Billings is obviously more interested in convictions than justice – in more ways than one.
Billings clearly hates Holmes to the point of mania, and is well on his way to infecting all of Scotland Yard with that hate along with the gutter press who are always in search of sensational news. Painting Sherlock Holmes as being in league with devils and demons is VERY sensational indeed.
That Billings sees everyone not of his race, class and national origins as an actual devil of one sort or another just adds to the furor. Or at least Billings’ fury. Billings wants to lay every crime in London at the feet of immigrant anarchists who are naturally inferior in every way to good Englishmen. He’s even lobbying for permission to arm and militarize Scotland Yard to see all those he hates harshly regulated and eventually expelled.
Even from very early in the story, it’s clear that Titus Billings is “A” villain in this story. Whether or not he’s “THE” villain is another matter entirely.
The case, or rather cases, that Holmes is investigating in spite of Billings’ interference are puzzling in the extreme. A group of philanthropists are being cleverly murdered in ways that appear as accidents or suicides. All by different means, all by different methods, often in different parts of the country, but always including collateral family damage in the form of yet more accidents and suicides.
Holmes is doubly captured by this case because it is both so diabolically clever and because his brother Mycroft is on the list of possible victims.
And again, there’s a character who stands out as “A” villain but not necessarily “THE” villain.
So Holmes is distracted and at cross-purposes with himself in this investigation even as he does his damndest to evade both the police and the reporters who are determined to catch him in a compromised position. Even if they have to arrange it for themselves. Which they have. And do. And most definitely ARE at every turn – or perhaps that should be wrench – of the screw.
Escape Rating B-: And this is the point where those quotes come in, along with the good old British expression about “over-egging the pudding”. Because, as much as I did enjoy this entry in the series, I didn’t like it nearly as much as the others. I ended the story, and actually middled the story, feeling like the pudding had been over-egged in every direction.
Previous entries in this series have read as if they owed some of their portrait of these beloved characters to late 20th and early 21st century portrayals. That’s both to be expected and at least a bit necessary, as Doyle’s Holmes was a man of his time, and we like to at least think we’ve moved beyond some of the extreme bigotry of that era – whether we actually have or not.
But this entry in particular, due to the over-the-top, over-egged and utterly odious Titus Billings, reads as though the story crossed the line into speaking more TO our time than FROM its historical setting. Billings as a character reads like a caricature of all that is odious in our now. Not that his attitudes weren’t common and not that those prejudices didn’t exist and have terrible influence, not that the movements against homeless people (often military veterans), immigrants (popularly ALL believed to be terrorists), women (who are presumed to be hysterical), etc., weren’t prevalent, but the details of the way Billings operated felt just a bit too pointed at now instead of then.
The character very much invoked that saying about the more things change, the more they remain the same, but in his methods and what little reasoning we saw from him, he was a bit too on our time’s nose instead of his own.
On the other hand, the crime spree itself very much lived up to Scotty’s comment about overthinking a system to the point of making it easier to break instead of more difficult. Which turns out, in the end, to be exactly how the true villain gets caught in Sherlock Holmes’ trap instead of the other way around.
But again, the villainy was extremely over-egged. It got so theatrical and so complicated that not only did the right hand not know what the left hand was doing but as a reader I got more than a bit lost in all the theatricality to the point that I stopped caring about the victims and just wanted to get ALL the players off the stage so that they – and I – could recover from their collective shenanigans.
In the end I’m glad I read this one because events in this adventure do get referred to in later books, but it felt a great deal longer than Unquiet Spirits in spite of that story being nearly 150 pages longer than this one.
Speaking of other books in this Sherlock Holmes Adventure series, I’ve been winding my way through this series over the past several months and for the most part enjoying them immensely. I was planning to review the latest, The Serpent Under, THIS month for a blog tour, but the tour organizer has taken ill and postponed the tour. While that is on hiatus, I felt the compulsion to fill the hole in my schedule with a different book in the series, hence this review. This didn’t quite live up to the other books in the series for this reader, but I have to say that The Serpent Under very much did and I can’t wait until I can post that review!
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