A- #BookReview: The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBird

A- #BookReview: The Serpent Under by Bonnie MacBirdThe Serpent Under (A Sherlock Holmes Adventure #6) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #6
Pages: 375
Published by Collins Crime Club, Harper Collins on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Holmes and Watson face treachery and danger in the latest full-length thriller by Bonnie MacBird, author of the bestselling Sherlock Holmes novel Art in the Blood . Murder, jealousy, and deceit underscore three interlocking mysteries as Holmes and Watson take on a high profile case at Windsor Castle, a boy drowned in the Serpentine, and a crusading women’s rights activist who suspects a traitor in her organisation. The cases send them into danger into locales as varied as the palace itself, a dockland cannery, an arts and crafts atelier, and a gypsy encampment. But is there peril underfoot as well – right at 221B Baker Street? The twisting, breathlessly plotted conjoined mysteries that Bonnie MacBird is known for provide a thrill ride that will delight Sherlockians worldwide.

My Review:

There are a whole lot of serpents in this latest entry in the Sherlock Holmes Adventure series (after What Child is This?), of the reptilian as well as the human kind. A disconcerting number of them end up dead – again of both kinds – in this mystery that includes a surprisingly high body count for a detective who keeps his partner around, at least in part, because it’s Watson who is good with a gun.

On the other hand, there’s a BOMB, and those always cause a lot of collateral damage.

It begins with a dead body – as so many of the best mysteries do. The ‘Palace’ comes calling at 221b Baker Street, in the ‘person’ of a royal carriage and a coachman fully prepared to whisk Holmes and Watson off to Windsor Castle, whether they have other plans or not.

Which, come to think of it, describes more than a little about how this case progresses. The ‘high and mighty’ – and not just those at court – believe they can drag Sherlock Holmes around, order him to provide solutions at times of their choosing, all the while refusing to answer his questions so that he can FIND those solutions.

It’s both fun and frustrating, both for Holmes and for the reader, as we’re used to seeing him as the master of his domain – because he generally was. But this Holmes is still in his early 30s and isn’t quite there yet. He’s still at the ‘faking it until he makes it’ stage more than a bit. But he’s getting there and this reader at least is wondering if cases like this one are what gave him the push to get there as fast as possible.

I digress, but only a bit. I’ll do it again later.

The Palace has commandeered Holmes because they’ve got a nasty puzzle on their hands and need to get it solved before the circumstances get out – as they inevitably will. One of the Queen’s Ladies-in-Waiting was found at Windsor, stone-cold dead and seemingly the victim of suicide.

And that’s the way the Palace Guard wants to play it – so they can bury it and her as fast as possible. Literally sweep the dead woman under the rug.

The problem is that Miss Jane Wandley was extensively and extremely professionally tattooed just before her death. With a snake. Two snakes, actually, both eating their own tails in the ouroboros form, including a significant amount of the tattoo on her face with the heads of the snakes inked on top of her head and hidden under her artfully dressed hair.

She didn’t do THAT to herself. She didn’t kill herself either, as Holmes easily proves in spite of the palace functionaries having cleaned and moved the corpse and the crime scene while destroying an unconscionable amount of evidence.

And it is from that shocking point that the case sends out tendrils and tentacles (yes, I know that snakes don’t have tentacles but it still fits) as well as a whole lot of deadly fangs and death rattles all over the country as Holmes looks into every nook and cranny and snake’s nest to figure out who the real snake in this case is and what part of their own past tail, or tale, they are attempting to eat in their utter destruction of Jane Wandley and her entire family.

Escape Rating A-: The ouroboros image, that snake eating its own tail, turned out to be the perfect metaphor for this book! At the center of this insane mystery is a plot – and a pain – that twists through the story and back on itself – even as it reaches into the long ago but clearly not dead enough past of its perpetrator as well as its many victims.

Even as it also twists through some fascinating bits of history, as this takes place as the Victorian Era is winding towards its inevitable close while the fruits of the Industrial Revolution shape what is to come – and a bit of what comes in this mystery as well.

The Wandley family, as the current victims of this insane mess of a case, represent the crossroads between the old and the new. Jane seems to have been a paragon of the old female virtues even if she was a bit of a tyrant – or especially because. But her younger sister is VERY active in the women’s suffrage movement, while her brother is an artist working for Christie’s auction house and gallery – then an influential force in the lucrative Arts & Crafts artistic movement and still extant today.

The design inked on Jane’s face was drawn by her brother Clarence for Christie’s, while the women’s rights group that her sister Kate belongs to has been the target of a snake of its own, setting them up for violent encounters with the police designed to discredit their movement as a gaggle of hysterical females.

While it’s clear to both Holmes and the reader that someone has it out for the Wandley family, it’s only when he dives deeply into the past that he is able to follow the twisted path of an even more twisted mind to find the dark beginning to this old, cold plan for revenge.

This case, like the previous cases in this series, is every bit as twisty and even confounding as those of the original canon. Howsomever, what makes this variation interesting in its own right is just how much it owes to more recent portrayals of this archetypical duo.

Through Watson’s eyes, we’re allowed to see a bit more of what makes Holmes tick – and occasionally, pardon the pun, tock. Because Holmes is portrayed as being neuroatypical – even if it wasn’t called that in his time – and being aware that he marches to the beat of a slightly different drummer. Just as Watson is aware that Holmes needs him as a sounding board and audience even if he never takes Watson’s advice. Occasionally, Watson doesn’t take Holmes’ advice either, as they both demonstrate in this case.

Also, one of the things that is clear if you go back and read the original stories with a fresh eye, is that Holmes in the original was very much a man of his time – with all the predilections and prejudices thereof. In the case of The Serpent Under, as has been true for the other books in this series, we observe Holmes in situations that make it clear that this Holmes has been written a bit more for our time in his respect for people that late Victorian society did look down upon with extreme prejudice. He never leaps to what would have been the easy conclusion about the perpetrator of this particular case, that either the Roma people did it, or were at least guilty of something that precipitated it, that Clarence Wandley or his male lover were responsible purely because they are homosexual, or that Kate Wandley must have caused it all because women’s rights advocates are all hysterical. Or even worse, that Jane Wandley must have provoked her own murder merely because she was female.

There’s none of that and it makes the case that much more complicated because this Holmes does not succumb to taking any of the easy ways out.

I did say I’d digress one more time before I close, and that digression regards the timeline of this series. The original Holmes stories were not published in chronological order, and this series does not seem to be either. Which led me to a deep dive about when they were set and whether or not Mrs. Mary Watson (née Morstan) was still alive at this particular point in time. Which she was but Watson never mentions why he seems to be rooming with Holmes at 221b while he’s got a wife somewhere. Previous books have at least mentioned the poor woman being off visiting relatives!

The second part of my timeline digression has to do with one of the usually fixed points in the Holmesian timeline. Specifically, Holmes’ encounter with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, which took place April 24-May 4, 1891. That’s barely a month after this story takes place, but there isn’t even a Moriarty in sight in this particular interpretation. Which means that I’m wondering really, really hard about just how that’s all going to work out in the next book. If it does at all. We’ll certainly see in the hopefully not too distant future.

Of course, this Holmes’ Moriarty might have been encountered in the one earlier books I haven’t read yet,  The Three Locks. (I absolutely cannot believe that Vidocq is Moriarty. If THAT turns out to be the case I need to go out and buy a hat so I can eat it!) Clearly I need to find out post haste. Which means I’ll be picking up that book even sooner than I thought!

#BookReview: The Devil’s Due by Bonnie MacBird

#BookReview: The Devil’s Due by Bonnie MacBirdThe 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 WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter 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!

Grade A #BookReview: Unquiet Spirits by Bonnie MacBird

Grade A #BookReview: Unquiet Spirits by Bonnie MacBirdUnquiet Spirits: Whisky, Ghosts, Murder (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #2) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #2
Pages: 512
Published by Collins Crime Club on July 17, 2017
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The new novel from the author of Art in the Blood. December 1889. Fresh from debunking a "ghostly" hound in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes has returned to London, only to find himself the target of a deadly vendetta. A beautiful client arrives with a tale of ghosts, kidnapping and dynamite on a whisky estate in Scotland, but brother Mycroft trumps all with an urgent assignment in the South of France. On the fabled Riviera, Holmes and Watson encounter treachery, explosions, rival French Detective Jean Vidocq...and a terrible discovery. This propels the duo northward to the snowy highlands. There, in a "haunted" castle and among the copper dinosaurs of a great whisky distillery, they and their young client face mortal danger, and Holmes realizes all three cases have blended into a single, deadly conundrum. In order to solve the mystery, the ultimate rational thinker must confront a ghost from his own past. But Sherlock Holmes does not believe in ghosts...or does he?

My Review:

The case, or cases, or perhaps that should be barrels or casks of cases, in which Holmes finds himself in this adventure are fully represented by the three items in the book’s subtitle. There is plenty of whisky in this multi-pronged affair, even if Holmes himself doesn’t drink very much of it at all.

(It is ‘whisky’ and not ‘whiskey’ because that part of the story involves the production of Scottish whisky. Only America and Ireland commonly spell it ‘whiskey’ although there are as many variations of where it is spelled which as there are variations in the spirit itself.)

About that second word in the subtitle – as well as a second definition of the word “spirit” – which comes into play as this is a story that is very much involved with ghosts. While Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as the ultimate rational man in that he absolutely does not believe in spirits of the ghostly kind, he is still human and is as haunted by his own past actions and regrets as any of us.

Even if he is utterly unwilling to admit it – to the point of burying the memories that give rise to those ghosts.

As much as his initial client in this wheels within wheels mystery of conspiracy and murder revolves around others’ belief in ghosts and hauntings versus Holmes’ utter lack thereof, the true heart of the case is wrapped around events in Holmes’ past that continue to haunt his present – and may very lead to that third word in the book’s subtitle if he doesn’t let himself remember things that he’s been doing his very damndest to suppress for more than a decade.

Escape Rating A: One of the reasons that I’m enjoying this series, and this interpretation of the Great Detective and his friend and chronicler, is that it feels like it owes much of its presentations of the characters to more recent portrayals of this iconic duo in movies and television.

In other words, this Holmes is more human and more feeling than the Holmes canon’s ‘thinking machine’, and his relationship with Watson is much warmer even if the true bonds of their friendship are seldom, if ever, explicitly stated.

That this particular story is both a convoluted and twisted mystery worthy of Holmes at his best while, at the same time, being a case that relies on his humanity coming back to bite him in the ass is just a bit of what made this story so compelling to read. (I literally finished it in a day.)

At the same time, something that adds to at least this reader’s compulsion to find out whodunnit so very quickly was the way that it wove the real world events and conditions of the time into the motivations for at least some of the characters’ actions – whether legal, illegal or merely scandalous. (We forget that Holmes’ original creator didn’t deal with historical events because they weren’t historical to him or his intended readers. Those real historical events were exactly the kind of thing that people were reading the Holmes stories to escape FROM, then, where we, from close to a century and a half later, are hoping to escape TO, now.)

I picked up this particular entry in Bonnie MacBird’s Sherlock Holmes Adventure series because I enjoyed the first book, Art in the Blood, and really, really liked the fifth book, What Child is This?, when I read it as part of this year’s Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon. That fifth book gave just enough hints about the content of the books I hadn’t yet read, which at that time included this book as well as The Devil’s Due and The Three Locks, to tide me over the parts I hadn’t read while still leaving me plenty teased to find out all the details of what I missed.

This whole, entire story being an exploration of those details that I was previously missing. I had been a bit put off by the projected 512 page length of this one, but this ‘twilight zone’ period between Xmas and New Year’s seemed like the perfect time. Which it absolutely was.

(Also, if you are put off by that prodigious length, please don’t be. It not only reads really, really fast in the sense that one gets caught up in it, but also in the sense that it doesn’t take nearly as long in actual reading minutes as it would if it were truly 512 pages long. In hardcover those pages must have been nearly large print.)

About the story, well, I did have a grand time even if Holmes and Watson were mostly not. But then, that’s usually the case with a Holmes story, isn’t it? Especially for Watson. Holmes generally seems to be in his element, and part of that element usually involves keeping poor Watson in the dark EVEN as he’s asking the good doctor to bring his revolver. Although this particular story certainly wasn’t any fun for Holmes, either. Cathartic – absolutely. Fun, not so much. Also very nearly deadly but that just added to the speed of this reader’s page-turning.

To make a long story – although not nearly as long as this story purported to be – short, I had a fantastic reading time with this interpretation of Holmes and Watson and the Unquiet Spirits they faced. I will be continuing my catch-up read of the series with The Devil’s Due the next time the mood strikes.

And I’m absolutely looking forward to reading the sixth and latest book in this compelling series, The Serpent Under, for a blog tour in just a few short weeks!

Grade A #BookReview: What Child is This? by Bonnie MacBird

Grade A #BookReview: What Child is This? by Bonnie MacBirdWhat Child is This? (Sherlock Holmes Adventure #5) by Bonnie MacBird, Frank Cho
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, holiday fiction, holiday mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #5
Pages: 228
Published by Collins Crime Club on October 13, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

It’s the season of peace and goodwill, but a Victorian Christmas is no holiday for the world’s most popular detective in this new book from Bonnie MacBird, author of the bestselling Sherlock Holmes novel Art in the Blood.
It’s Christmastime in London, and Sherlock Holmes takes on two cases. The angelic three-year-old child of a wealthy couple is the target of a vicious kidnapper, and a country aristocrat worries that his handsome, favourite son has mysteriously vanished from his London pied à terre. Holmes and Watson, aided by the colourful Heffie O’Malley, slip slide in the ice to ensure a merry Christmas is had by nearly everybody . . .

My Review:

I wasn’t expecting to find a Sherlock Holmes story to include in my personal Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon. Not that I wasn’t willing to, considering how much I love Sherlock Holmes stories, but rather that Holmes can be a bit of a curmudgeon at the best of times.

He may not be, in any way, a miser like Ebenezer Scrooge but he’s certainly more than capable of bah-ing and humbug-ing with the best of them. Or the worst of them as the case might be.

And then I remembered that the Holmes series I just started earlier this month with Art in the Blood, included a Holmes’ Christmas tale, and to paraphrase the Great Detective himself, the game was afoot.

What Child is This? (yes, the question mark is part of the title and it’s driving me batty) connects two stories with loosely similar themes under the banner of the holiday season and runs away with them. Or sets them on fire. Or a bit of both.

The Marquis of Blandbury, Henry Weathering, comes to Holmes because his adult son Reginald hasn’t written to his mother in weeks, and the woman is beside herself because it’s so very much not like him. Even dear-old-dad, who does not seem the worrying sort, is worried – if only second hand. He’s more concerned about his wife’s peace of mind than his son’s current whereabouts but even the rather blunt instrument that is the Marquis knows that something isn’t right and he expects Holmes to find out precisely what.

The other case, the much more serious case, is one that literally drops into Holmes’ and Watson’s laps. Or at least falls right into their hands. They witness a well-to-do woman and her attendant get attacked by a crazed assailant who knocks them both over as he plucks the woman’s little boy right out of her arms. And attempts to flee with the child through the crowded streets.

With Sherlock Holmes in hot pursuit, Watson attends to the women who have been so grievously assaulted. Holmes doesn’t manage to catch his man – but he does successfully rescue the little boy and restore him to his mother’s waiting arms.

The two cases don’t have anything in common beyond the fact that both originate with potentially missing sons. Of course, Holmes, with Watson’s able assistance, solves both cases.

But neither case goes to any of the places that the reader originally believes they will, and the solutions are far from orthodox. They are both cases where Holmes displays the heart that he would claim that he does not have – with his dear friend Watson there, as always, to record that he does.

Escape Rating A: I loved this – and I think I loved it more because it feels like the characterizations of Holmes and Watson read like they owe a lot more to the screen adaptations of the past OMG 40 years, starting with Jeremy Brett, than they do to the earlier portrayals of Basil Rathbone and even the original Holmes canon itself.

Not that the two cases aren’t every bit as confounding and convoluted as any of the Holmes’ stories penned by Conan Doyle, but rather that the characters of our two protagonists have been made just that bit more human and more sympathetic than the original ‘thinking machine’ and his idiot sidekick.

Instead, this is a portrayal where Holmes is aware that he is just a bit ‘different’ from most people, and where Watson knows and understands that part of his purpose in Holmes’ life and in their long friendship is to allow Holmes to explain his deductions – even as he stinks up their apartment with his experiments.

There is a mutual respect in that friendship – a respect that would have had to have existed for Holmes to have tolerated Watson’s inability to follow his genius and for Watson to have tolerated Holmes’ frequent high-handed treatment of him. There’s also an awareness on Watson’s part that these are NEVER fair play mysteries. Holmes always keeps secrets even when that lack of knowledge might endanger Watson’s life.

The solutions to both of these cases are extremely unorthodox – which made them that much more fascinating. Something that was made even more clear to me as I listened to The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, the canon story with which this adventure was very loosely in dialogue. THAT Holmes would never have come to either of these resolutions, but THIS Holmes is all the better for doing so.

I liked my first taste of this author’s Sherlock Holmes Adventure in Art in the Blood, but I really got into this interpretation with this Christmas story. There are three stories between Art and this one, and the events of those stories was teased just a bit in this one – more than enough to make me eager to read them.

And I’m definitely looking forward to the latest entry in the series, The Serpent Under, coming in January!

#BookReview: Art in the Blood by Bonnie MacBird

#BookReview: Art in the Blood by Bonnie MacBirdArt in the Blood (Sherlock Holmes Adventure, #1) by Bonnie MacBird
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Sherlock Holmes Adventure #1
Pages: 300
Published by Collins Crime Club on August 27, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

London. A snowy December, 1888.
Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend – until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris. Mademoiselle La Victoire, a beautiful French cabaret star writes that her illegitimate son by an English Lord has disappeared, and she has been attacked in the streets of Montmartre.
Racing to Paris with Watson at his side, Holmes discovers the missing child is only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem. The most valuable statue since the Winged Victory has been violently stolen in Marseilles, and several children from a silk mill in Lancashire have been found murdered. The clues in all three cases point to a single, untouchable man.
Will Holmes recover in time to find the missing boy and stop a rising tide of murders? To do so he must stay one step ahead of a dangerous French rival and the threatening interference of his own brother, Mycroft.
This latest adventure, in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sends the iconic duo from London to Paris and the icy wilds of Lancashire in a case which tests Watson's friendship and the fragility and gifts of Sherlock Holmes' own artistic nature to the limits.

My Review:

“Art in the blood” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? It also might sound just a bit familiar – as well as in keeping with this first book in the author’s Sherlock Holmes Adventure series. The quote is from Holmes himself in the original canon, specifically The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter.

In that story, Holmes attributes both his own and his brother Mycroft’s skill in and facility with the ‘Art of Detection’ to the “art in the blood” inherited from their grandmother, “who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist.”

(There were several members of the Vernet family who lived at approximately the right time and were artists, Claude Joseph Vernet, Carle Vernet and Horace Vernet. Which Vernet Holmes referred to is one of the MANY things about his origins that can be speculated about but is never definitely stated.)

As this story begins, the art in Sherlock Holmes’ blood, combined with an utter dearth of interesting cases and possibly owing more than a bit to the absence of his friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson, has dropped the ‘Great Detective’ into a slough of despond, causing Holmes to resort to entirely too many applications of his ‘seven-per-cent solution’ of cocaine.

Holmes is a bigger mess than even his usual depths and the generally unflappable Mrs. Hudson is at her wits’ end. She can’t help Holmes but she knows just who can.

So she calls Watson, in both of his capacities – as Holmes’ friend AND most definitely as his physician, because she can’t tell which her lodger needs more.

As it turns out – both. But what Holmes needs above all – is a case that will test him to his utmost. A case that is presented to him, literally on a silver salver, from several directions at the same time.

Brother Mycroft blackmails him into investigating a violent art theft at the Louvre. A beautiful French chanteuse begs him to discover the location of her missing child. Children are being kidnapped and murdered from a silk mill in Lancashire.

One seemingly untouchable aristocrat is at the center of all three cases. The silk mill is his. The chanteuse’s child is also his. And the statue at the center of the art theft is on its way to him in Lancashire even as Holmes and Watson dash from London to Paris and back in an attempt to put all the pieces together before it is once again too late for another poor child.

Or for themselves.

Escape Rating B+: This book has had a place deep in the virtually towering TBR pile for almost a decade – which is kind of embarrassing. I usually say that I read about 50% of the books I get – EVENTUALLY. This is apparently what that eventually looks like. To be fair, I liked this one more than enough to BUY the rest of the series that’s out so far and pick up the eARC for the forthcoming entry, The Serpent Under.

I spelunked into that TBR pile because I was looking for another comfort read after Old Scores. In fact, I was looking for something ‘like’ Barker & Llewelyn that wasn’t actually them. Which is what led me around to this series, as Barker & Llewelyn may not be Holmes but it is in dialogue with the ‘Great Detective’ so I decided to approach that dialogue from a different angle.

Cyrus Barker & Thomas Llewelyn are variations on Sherlock Holmes & John Watson in the sense that they are set in the same time period and feature a detective duo where one is clearly the genius and the other a follower, BUT, they also change the formula and speak to our time even more than their own by exploring and empathizing with the people of London – and elsewhere – who were outsiders in the city they called home. Barker is Scots, Llewelyn is Welsh, Barker’s business partner is Chinese, Llewelyn’s fiance is Jewish, as is his best friend – and the list, as well as the cases that are involved – goes on and on and into neighborhoods that the original Holmes would have looked down upon and only considered while stereotyping the people within.

The Holmes & Watson of this set of adventures, reads as though it is not so much the child of the original as the grandchild of the original canon, filtered through an intermediate generation of TV interpretations, notably Jeremy Brett’s Victorian-era Holmes, the more modern Sherlock and Elementary – with a touch of Robert Downey Jr.’s manic movie Holmes as well.

(I think I spy just a bit of Laurie R. King’s Holmes from her Holmes & Russell series too, but your reading mileage may vary.)

So, very much on the one hand, the Holmes of Art in the Blood is a bit more, not so much emotional as demonstrative. He’s more of a romantic hero in the small ‘r’ sense of romance, more self-sacrificing, more likely to put himself in harm’s way – and more likely to get there on his own – more likely to have an obvious soft spot for small children in need of rescue.

It’s not that the original Holmes doesn’t have most of those characteristics, more than he hides them better.

The case in Art in the Blood, while every bit as convoluted – and then some – as some of the original stories, displays a lot more confusion on Holmes’ part and frankly a lot more competence on Watson’s – a competency that calls back to Edward Hardwicke’s Doctor Watson, the partner of Jeremy Brett’s Holmes.

In other words, I had as much fun figuring out which ways this resembled other interpretations of these characters that I have seen or read as I did following along with the multiple mysteries in this story as they wound their multitude of ways into one dastardly whole. A whole that was quite a bit deeper and darker than one expects from a Sherlock Holmes story – but every bit as chilling, thrilling AND deadly.

I had fun reading Art in the Blood, and it certainly distracted me at a time when that’s exactly what I was looking for. Which means that I picked up the whole rest of the series so I’ll be back with Unquiet Spirits the next time I need a mysteriously comforting read.

A- #BookReview: The Mummy of Mayfair by Jeri Westerson

A- #BookReview: The Mummy of Mayfair by Jeri WestersonThe Mummy of Mayfair (An Irregular Detective Mystery #2) by Jeri Westerson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Irregular Detective #2
Pages: 224
Published by Severn House on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Private investigators Timothy Badger and Benjamin Watson take on another unusual and baffling case in Victorian London when a mummy unwrapping party takes a chilling turn.London, 1895. Although their last high profile case was a huge success, private detectives Tim Badger and Benjamin Watson know they can't afford to turn down any work, despite financial assistance from their mentor, Sherlock Holmes.So when the eminent Doctor Enock Sawyer of St Bart's Hospital asks Badger if the duo will provide security for a mummy unwrapping party he is hosting, Badger doesn't hesitate to take the job. After all, how hard can guarding the doctor's bizarre Egyptian artefacts be? But with Doctor Sawyer running late for his own party, the 'genuine' ancient sarcophagus of Runihura Saa is unravelled to reveal the remains of . . . Doctor Sawyer! Suddenly, the pair are drawn into a new case that's stranger and twister than they could ever have imagined.

My Review:

The “irregularity” of the Irregular Detective series is in the person of one of its protagonists, Timothy Badger of the Badger and Watson Detecting Agency. Once upon a time, Badger was one of the “invisible” children who operated as Sherlock Holmes’ eyes and ears on the streets of Victorian London. In other words, Tim Badger was one of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars.

But when Badger aged out – or grew up – out of the Irregulars, he still needed to make his living. Which is where his partner, jack-of-all-trades Benjamin Watson comes into the picture. Both from the “wrong side of the tracks” in the East End, without a shilling between them, they set up as private detectives in the mode of Badger’s former ‘Guv’, the Great Detective himself.

As seen in the first entry in this series, The Isolated Séance, after five years of struggle to keep body and soul together, Sherlock Holmes himself gave these ‘apprentices’ a bit of a leg up. Their perseverance was rewarded with rooms in Soho – several steps up the economic ladder from their previous lodgings and office – and a seemingly magical refilling box of money for expenses.

They’re doing well for themselves. It’s a lot of hard work and shoe leather – but their successes seem to outnumber their failures. They have as much work as they can handle – and even their own chronicler in the person of newspaper reporter Ellsie Littleton.

Which leads to this second sensational case, The Mummy of Mayfair. A moniker that seems ripped, not from the headlines, but from the titles of the penny dreadful fiction that Badger loves to read. Watson prefers the newspapers and scientific journals.

After all, someone in this partnership needs to keep their feet on the ground, especially with a case that has so much potential to ascend – or perhaps that’s descend – into flights of fantasy and mythology.

It begins with a mummy unwrapping party. An all too common event among the upper crust in the 1890s. It was the heyday of ‘Egyptomania’, with all of the implications of madness the word mania implies.

Badger and Watson were hired by Dr. Enoch Sawyer to provide security for his mummy unwrapping party. A party that takes an even more macabre turn when the mummy is finally unwrapped to reveal that it’s not the mummy of Runihura Saa. It’s the much more recent mummy of Dr. Enoch Sawyer – their client – who is clearly not going to be able to pay them for the job they are about to do on his behalf.

And the game is afoot!

Escape Rating A-: First, I loved this every bit as much as the first book in this series, The Isolated Séance. Second, I need to kick myself for not figuring out that the series title is a pun until now. I sorta/kinda thought the cases were “irregular” and they are that – from a séance in the first book to a mummy in the second. But it’s the DETECTIVES – or at least one of them – that are irregular. As in, the Baker Street Irregulars. 🤦🏻

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, what makes this case so much fun is the way that it blends the real with the fictional.

Mummy unwrapping parties were a very real thing in the 1890s – as shown in the painting below by artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux circa 1890. The scene may seem macabre to 21st century readers, but such parties were all the rage in 1895, when The Mummy of Mayfair takes place.

Rage also being an important factor – at least in this particular case – as the ‘mania’ led people to strange rivalries and illegal behaviors – as humans are wont to do in the throes of a craze, fad, or mania. It still happens now, and humans haven’t changed all that much in just a bit over a century.

As much as the insanity of this particular mania turns out to be the impetus for the actions of the characters, what is making the series work are the characters and the way they manage to fit into – and take off from – the canon of Sherlock Holmes and ITS well-known and loved protagonists.

The best detectives, whether amateur or professional, are outsiders. It’s nearly impossible for humans to set aside their preconceived notions and biases in regards to people they know. A fact which very nearly sends the entire case on a wild goose chase, as one of the possible suspects is one of Badger’s former colleagues in the Irregulars.

But the triumvirate necessary to fill all of the roles that in the original canon were filled by just two changes the structure of the investigation even as it challenges the reader to see Holmes’ Victorian age from a considerably less lofty perspective.

Timothy Badger grew up in the East End, living by his wits and the nimbleness of his fingers. His accent clearly marks him as being of a “lower class” to the toffs among whom he now finds himself – and he has to grow into his role without giving up who he essentially is.

Benjamin Watson is a black man in a white world. The first thing that anyone sees when they meet him is the color of his skin. He has the intelligence and the drive to have been anything within his reach, but his reach in the late Victorian era is circumscribed by his race.

Miss Ellsie Moira Littleton is a woman in a man’s world. Much like Charlotte Sloane in the Regency-set Wrexford and Sloane series, Ellsie has been forced by circumstances to be self-supporting, and is on the outside of the society to which she was born. As an intelligent, educated, woman who needs to make her own way, she is also an outsider but with an entirely different perspective on the society of which she was once a member.

From its sensational beginning, the case is a deeply puzzling mess. Badger and Watson’s preconceived notions about their clients and their former associates, as well as their lack of knowledge of the precise ways the rich spend their time and money and protect their positions frequently send them haring off in the wrong directions – and we follow them eagerly even as they frequently caution each other.

As I’ve said frequently within these pages, I’m a sucker for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and that’s why I initially started this series. Now I’m hooked! I’m really looking forward to the next book in this series, The Misplaced Physician, where we’ll finally get to meet Sherlock Holmes’ Watson, as Badger and his Watson will be on the case of rescuing him! It’s a good thing that investigative reporter Ellsie Littleton will be on hand to record the adventure, as the original Watson may be too embarrassed – or too injured – to write it up himself.

We’ll certainly see, hopefully this time next year!

Grade A #BookReview: The Lantern’s Dance by Laurie R. King

Grade A #BookReview: The Lantern’s Dance by Laurie R. KingThe Lantern's Dance (Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, #18) by Laurie R. King
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes #18
Pages: 300
Published by Bantam on February 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, hoping for a respite in the French countryside, are instead caught up in a case that turns both bewildering and intensely personal.
After their recent adventures in Transylvania, Russell and Holmes look forward to spending time with Holmes' son, the famous artist Damian Adler, and his family. But when they arrive at Damian’s house, they discover that the Adlers have fled from a mysterious threat.
Holmes rushes after Damian while Russell, slowed down by a recent injury, stays behind to search the empty house. In Damian’s studio, she discovers four crates packed with memorabilia related to Holmes’ grand-uncle, the artist Horace Vernet. It’s an odd mix of treasures and clutter, including a tarnished silver lamp with a rotating an antique yet sophisticated form of zoetrope, fitted with strips of paper whose images dance with the lantern’s spin.
In the same crate is an old journal written in a nearly impenetrable code. Intrigued, Russell sets about deciphering the intricate cryptograph, slowly realizing that each entry is built around an image—the first of which is a child, bundled into a carriage by an abductor, watching her mother recede from view.
Russell is troubled, then entranced, but each entry she decodes brings more questions. Who is the young woman who created this elaborate puzzle? What does she have to do with Damian, or the Vernets—or the threat hovering over the house?
The secrets of the past appear to be reaching into the present. And it seems increasingly urgent that Russell figure out how the journal and lantern are related to Damian—and possibly to Sherlock Holmes himself.
Could there be things about his own history that even the master detective does not perceive?

My Review:

As Holmes himself once said, “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms,” but as this 18th book in the continuing chronicles of Sherlock Holmes and his apprentice-turned-wife Mary Russell opens, Holmes is considerably more worried about the form that blood might take spilled from his son’s veins on the floor of the French cottage where Holmes adult son, Damien Adler, his young daughter Estelle and his wife-to-be Dr. Aileen Henning have set up house and home in Damien’s inheritance from his mother Irene Adler.

Someone, a man Adler described as a ‘lascar’ broke into his home in the middle of the night, kukri in hand, to do who knows what damage or cause who knows what type of mayhem.

Adler does his best to convince himself it was all a prank gone wrong. But Holmes, with too many enemies still lurking in his shady past and even his more circumspect present, is not nearly so sanguine about the whole thing. There are, after all, plenty of criminals who would like to put the squeeze on Sherlock Holmes by threatening his son and his granddaughter, and most likely even more powers and potentates who would be interested in having some leverage against that puller of the British Empire’s strings and minder of its webs, Mycroft Holmes, by kidnapping his nephew and great-niece.

Holmes’ primary concern, desire and dilemma, all in one gordian knot of emotions he is reluctant in the extreme to untangle, is to get Damien, Aileen and Estelle somewhere safe so that he can run the meager clues about the break in and its elusive perpetrator to ground. Possibly to put them in that ground if necessary.

Damien wants to continue his work as an up-and-coming surrealist artist – AND he wants his father to explain what the hell is going on. In other words, Damien Adler wants to be treated as the adult he is as well as protect his family.

While Russell is, at least at the outset, a bit of a ‘fifth wheel’ in this family drama of which she is more of an appendage that a central part. Unfortunately for her, an appendage with a sprained ankle, hobbling around on crutches, in the house where her predecessor, the famous and famously beautiful Irene Adler, once ruled. If her ankle wasn’t already making her miserable enough, this entire situation has more than enough undercurrents to discomfit even Russell.

So the dust on the initial break in settles with Damien in Paris, Holmes following behind to check for traps, tagalongs and any possible gathering of confederates, while Russell is left behind in Irene Adler’s old house, going through the detritus of codes long left unbroken and old family secrets. Only to discover that the reason for the break in has been hidden in plain sight, and that too many of the truths that Sherlock Holmes has believed all his life were lies all along.

And that more of that art in the blood that his son received in full measure from his mother’s well-known artistic family bore other, more mysterious fruit much closer to its source.

Escape Rating A: This one begins slowly, as Russell languishes – a bit – alone in the countryside while Holmes hares off to Paris and points beyond. At first, it felt like the story was creeping along, much as Russell is doing with her crutches. But Russell’s temporary infirmity forces her to sit still – something that chafes at her no end.

But that stillness – and the lack of ability to rush about after Holmes – forces her to take the time to explore her briefly confined circumstances. And thereby, quite literally, hangs this tale.

Also, and fascinatingly so, as Russell’s leg gets better, as she graduates from crutches to a cane to walking unaided, as she picks up her pace the story increases its pace in tandem. By the time she is able to unravel all of the mysteries, she is searching Paris on foot, chasing down leads and putting the pieces together at her – and her story’s – usual brisk pace.

So initially, while Holmes is the active partner and Russell is stuck in place, he’s actually spinning his wheels, trying to safeguard someone who refuses to obey orders, looking over his shoulder at every moment, and always operating at an information deficit as he’s forced to react to circumstances rather than think first and then act.

Russell has that luxury. She’s stuck, she has time to think, and plenty to think about. While Holmes and the rest of the family are running, she’s questioning the locals and exploring the house, where she finds clues that lead her to the true heart of the mystery – and to its bittersweet conclusion.

In the end, I did love this entry in the series, although it took me a bit to get there because of that slow start. But now that I’ve finished, I’m left with the impression that this is more of a family story than it is the kind of mystery that has more often been featured in this series, and in the Holmes canon and Russell Kanon in general. On this, the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice – the story where Russell nearly tripped over Holmes on the Sussex Downs – it feels right that we go back to, not their beginning, but rather to Holmes’ own beginning, and get a much clearer picture of where he came from and the forces that made him – and Mycroft for that matter – the men they became.

In other words, The Lantern’s Dance feels like a story that will be utterly riveting for fans of the series, but would not make a good place for a newcomer to start. If you have not yet had the pleasure of Mary Russell’s acquaintance, I highly recommend that you begin at the beginning, with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and settle in for a long and delightful read.

Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Silver Cord by M.K. Wiseman

Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Silver Cord by M.K. WisemanSherlock Holmes & the Silver Cord by M.K. Wiseman
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: historical mystery
Pages: 198
Published by M.K. Wiseman on August 1, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

"I speak of magic, Mr. Holmes." Poor Mr. Percy Simmons, leader of London's Theosophical Order of Odic Forces, stands upon the hearth rug of 221B Baker Street, slowly mangling his hat brim in ill-concealed distress and fully aware that his is not a case which Mr. Sherlock Holmes would ordinarily take up. These are not ordinary times, however. For something, some unquiet demon within Holmes stirs into discomfiting wakefulness under the occultist'swords. This unassuming Mr. Simmons has-in addition to his more fantastical of claims-spoken of good and evil with the sort of pure conviction and sincerity of soul that Sherlock yearns for. Something Holmes sought for himself during the three years in which the world thought him dead. While, for all intents, constructions, and purposes, he was dead. But, six months ago, Sherlock Holmes gave up that chase. He returned to Baker Street, declared himself alive to friend and foe alike, took up his old rooms, his profession, and his partnership with Dr. J. Watson. Only to find himself haunted still by the questions which had followed him out of the dreadful chasm of Reichenbach Why? Why had he survived when his enemy had not? To what end? And had there ever, truly, been such a thing as justice? Such a thing as good or evil?

My Review:

Sherlock Holmes & the Silver Cord, chronologically at least, is the kind of story that should have been included in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, right after The Adventure of the Empty House.

Why? Because The Empty House was the story that marked the return of Sherlock Holmes after his encounter with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem. And Silver Cord takes place just a few short months after Empty House, and shows that Holmes’ personal house of the soul and spirit is every bit as empty as that house he led Moriarty’s remaining henchmen to stake out upon his return to London.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why this story, like the author’s previous forays into Holmes pastiches, Sherlock Holmes & the Ripper of Whitechapel and Sherlock Holmes & the Singular Affair, came from the pen of the Great Detective himself and was not written after the fact by his ‘Boswell’, Dr. John H. Watson.

Sherlock Holmes as Watson portrayed him was a ‘thinking machine’, a creature made entirely of intellect who revealed little of his own inner workings and devoted all his prodigious mental powers to his cases. Watson did not show him as a man of finer feelings or filled with an inner life, nor did he portray his friend as particularly virtuous. Rather, Watson’s Holmes was an ascetic because he didn’t care about finer feelings, his own or anyone else’s.

The Sherlock in Silver Cord, however, shows an all-too-human side that Watson probably thought he knew, but in more depth of angst than Victorian sensibilities would ever have allowed him to portray – or than Holmes himself would have ever chosen to show.

But in Holmes’ own mind, as we are in this story, we see a man dealing with the aftermath of a great but scarring undertaking, as well as a person who has spent years living by his wits and on his last nerve, suddenly expected to return to a normalcy that lacks the drive, focus and sheer adrenaline that has keep him alive in multiple senses of that word for more than long enough to get addicted to the sensation.

Perhaps even as much of an addiction as Holmes’ infamous seven-per-cent solution.

This is a case that has both Holmes and the reader hooked because it initially seems to deal in realms beyond the physical. For the reader, the complete lack of physical clues combined with the way that the actions of the villain seem determined to drive his victims to despair without any actual threats does have the potential to be paranormal in some form or fashion.

While the setting of these crimes – if they are crimes – among the cognoscenti of spiritualism and esoteric theologies pushes Holmes towards questions of his own morality, to the sharp but seemingly narrow dividing line between good and evil, and to his own mental meanderings into the state of his own soul after his deliberate plot to destroy his enemy.

Escape Rating B: The fascinating thing about this ‘series’ of Holmes stories is the way that the author has managed to create a combination of times, places and reasons why Holmes would be writing the story himself rather than using Watson as his amanuensis.

In the first outing, Sherlock Holmes & the Ripper of Whitechapel, Holmes wrote the story himself because Watson was, quite plausibly in fact, a potential suspect in the murders. The case of Sherlock Holmes & the Singular Affair took place in the time period just before Holmes met Watson and they took up rooms together at 221b.

In this case, it’s because Sherlock Holmes is caught up in his own angst about his premeditated plan to drop Moriarty to hell by way of the plunge down Reichenbach Falls – even if Holmes had to join him there himself. In a moment of clarity during that struggle, Holmes saw just how close he and his adversary were, that only a hairsbreadth separated their fates. Not just the question of who lived and who died, but of who should have. Holmes saw how little separated each of them from the other’s side of the line.

At the same time, Holmes is finding that normalcy is a bit, well, uninspiring in comparison to his years on the run. He’s suffering from what would today be labeled PTSD, keeping up a frenetic pace of investigations in order to substitute for the constant thrill of adrenaline he had lived under as he chased Moriarty’s remaining agents – and they chased him.

He’s also realizing that he’s been more than a bit of an ass in the way he treated Watson, not just in pretending to be dead at Reichenbach but in not standing with his friend in his hours of need. And then expecting Watson to just take him back and take back up with him the moment he returned.

And Holmes isn’t wrong about that last bit. He was an ass. And he frequently is. But Watson is at his side anyway, always and forever. Whether Holmes deserves it or not. And he is finally aware that he often does not.

Then there’s this case, which combines Holmes’ internal struggles and angst over recent events with a bit of envy that the people he’s investigating seem to have found ways to enlightenment or at least spiritual peace that have eluded him.

Holmes, for once in his otherwise skeptical life, wants there to be answers beyond this world – even if they are not for him.

What he discovers in the course of his investigation answers the more typical investigative questions of whodunnit, how did they do it and why did they do it without any involvement in the metaphysical. But it’s Holmes’ angst-ridden and inchoate search for answers to the questions ‘beyond the veil’ that give this story a sense that either it’s not quite the Holmes we’re used to – or Holmes isn’t quite who we expect him to be.

It all makes sense after reading the author’s notes at the end, but in the middle, as Holmes mostly spins his metaphysical and spiritual wheels in search of answers for himself rather than the case, it goes a bit off the well-beaten Holmesian path in a way that can be uncomfortable for the reader.

We don’t like to see our heroes stumble, and this is a story where Holmes is definitely stumbling – if only inside the confines of his own head. But seeing him trip over his own mental, spiritual and even moral feet makes him more human. Whether that’s a good take on the character or merely an unsettling one is left in the mind of the reader.

In this reader’s mind, while this portrait of the Great Detective as a seeking human was uncomfortable in its reading, it added rather a lot to the development of the character as he appears in later-set stories like Laurie R. King’s marvelous introduction to Holmes’ second act,  The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.

Your reading mileage, of course, may vary.

Review: The Wayward Prince by Leonard Goldberg

Review: The Wayward Prince by Leonard GoldbergThe Wayward Prince (The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, #7) by Leonard Goldberg
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Daughter of Sherlock Holmes #7
Pages: 336
Published by Minotaur Books on July 11, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.org
Goodreads

The fate of Prince Harry and the British throne lies in the hands of Joanna and the Watsons in the latest Daughter of Sherlock Holmes mystery from USA Today bestselling author Leonard Goldberg.

During the height of the Great War, playboy Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, vanishes in thin air while horseback riding in Hyde Park The strikingly handsome playboy prince is initially believed to have arranged his disappearance so he can enjoy a brief rendezvous with one of his secret lovers. But when his absence continues on for days, the royal family grows concerned and summons Scotland Yard, who can only recover scant, unrevealing clues.

The concern deepens when MI5 decodes a recent message from German spies in London which speaks of a captured asset that will bring great embarrassment to the Crown. There is a strong belief within the Intelligence agency that plans are underway to transport the captive prince to Berlin without delay. Despite an intensive search, no trace of the royal can be detected.

With Scotland Yard and MI5 baffled, Joanna and the Watsons are called in, and they soon find themselves entangled in a web of abortion, murder, treason, and spies, all of which is seemingly being orchestrated by an arch-enemy of the long-dead Sherlock Holmes. In their race to rescue Prince Harry, it becomes clear that the mastermind behind the maze of crimes has a singular motive in mind. He desires overdue revenge in the form of Joanna’s death.

My Review:

Even more strongly than yesterday’s book recalled the St. Cyr series, this seventh entry in The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes series intentionally calls back to its ‘parent’ on pretty much every page in a way that evokes a smile of nostalgia as well as an itch to see precisely which game is afoot. Even though the times have moved on from the original Holmes’ Victorian Era to the new Edwardian Age – and the new century – there are always going to be cases that cry out for the genius of the ‘Great Detective’.

And just as Sherlock Holmes’ genius and methods are carried on by his progeny, so too are the evil plots of his enemies by theirs – with a heaping helping of the desire for revenge stirring the pot.

At first, the case of the wayward prince seems straightforward. Well, more or less, sorta/kinda. It’s not that it doesn’t start out brimming with terrible possibilities, it’s just that those terrible possibilities are all rather mundane in the scheme of things.

Prince Harry, third in line for the throne (after the future Edward VIII AND the future George VI) is well into adulthood during the Great War taking place on the continent. Which does knock quite a few of the truly awful possibilities straight off the table.

Not to mention that the Prince has a habit of occasionally slipping away from his guards for a romantic assignation in the kinds of places and with the type of women that the Palace would not be best pleased to see splashed all over the gutter press.

But he’s been gone too long for that to be the case, which has now become urgent. It is much too plausible that the Prince has been abducted by German agents intending to cart him back to the Kaiser and parade him around to embarrass his father and his country. The cost to British morale would be incalculable.

Howsomever, the more that Mrs. Joanna Watson, the titular daughter of Sherlock Holmes, follows the trail of clues, the more certain she is that this is no simple kidnapping. Rather, it is a carefully laid plan to ensnare – not the Prince – but herself.

A new ‘Napoleon’ of crime is hiding in the shadows of war torn London, intending to lure, guide or, if necessary, drag the daughter of his father’s old enemy back to the place where once it seemed that both antagonists fell to their deaths – so that a different ending of that saga can finally be written.

Escape Rating A-: The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes series is always a guilty pleasure for this reader, and I have to say that this entry in the series was very pleasing indeed – in spite of the things that still niggle at me. This entry in the series was every bit as captivating as the first, and seems to have been the right book at the right time once again.

I fell right into this story and didn’t emerge until the last page, already itching for the next entry in the series – which does not seem to have been announced yet. Dammit.

The story in all of the books in this series so far relies on a combination of nostalgia, a passing familiarity with the popular image of Sherlock Holmes, and a love of convoluted puzzles of the type that Holmes himself used to find irresistible.

The nostalgia factor is personified in this series by the inclusion of Dr. John H. Watson, Sr., Sherlock Holmes’ investigative partner and friend. The senior Watson is now in his 80s, so he is there to provide a bit of gravitas, more than a hint of respectability, a crack shot when needed and a direct connection to Holmes and his work. He is not the chronicler nor is he the prime mover of events, but his part is necessary to the story and to its near-constant evocation of the late Holmes.

The action, the detection and the chronicling are in the hands of Dr. John H. Watson, Jr., a practicing pathologist, and his wife Joanna, the daughter of Sherlock Holmes. One of my biggest niggles about this series is that Joanna seems to exhibit every single one of Holmes’ personality tics, almost as though there’s a checklist being worked from.

That she has his genius is more than plausible – that she seems to go about every investigation mimicking his mannerisms is a bit too much.

That being said (and admittedly re-said, because it drives me batty every time), the cases themselves are both absorbing and fascinating, and this one is certainly no exception. The stakes are extremely high – even before Joanna learns the identity of her adversary.

The involvement of the Palace in the investigation – and more importantly the WAY that the Palace gets involved in the investigation – adds a level of both verisimilitude and schadenfreude that gives the reader more than a nod of recognition. The behavior of the Royals and the ‘Firm’ that protects them doesn’t seem to have changed much in the intervening century.

The reader does kind of know that Prince Harry is going to come out of this alright, because he is a historical figure and whether he misbehaved in quite this way or not, history records that he lived to see not only the Great War to its conclusion, but the next war as well.

And that’s fine because Prince Harry may be the macguffin in this mystery but that’s not the point of it all. It’s all about drawing Holmes’ daughter and his enemy’s son back to an all too familiar place and the solution to an all too possible ‘final problem’.

It’s that mystery and its reenactment that kept me turning pages until the end. But if this turns out not to be anyone’s end after all – as it didn’t the first time around – I would not only not be entirely surprised, but I’d be downright thrilled.

Review: The Isolated Seance by Jeri Westerson

Review: The Isolated Seance by Jeri WestersonThe Isolated Séance (An Irregular Detective Mystery #1) by Jeri Westerson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Irregular Detective #1
Pages: 224
Published by Severn House on June 6, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

The first in a gripping new Victorian mystery series set in London from critically acclaimed author Jeri Westerson.
Watch out, Sherlock! Introducing one-time Baker Street Irregular Timothy Badger and his partner-in-crime Benjamin Watson, two exciting and unconventional young consulting detectives, mentored by the great man himself, tackling intriguing and unusual cases in Victorian London with endearing verve and wit.
Sherlock Holmes's protégés Tim Badger and Benjamin Watson are catapulted into a tricky first case when a man is brutally murdered during a séance.
London, 1895. Former Baker Street Irregular Tim Badger is determined to follow in the footsteps of his great mentor, Sherlock Holmes, by opening his own consulting detective agency with his partner, Benjamin Watson. The intrepid duo are ready to make a name for themselves . . . if only they had clients!
Their luck changes when Sherlock recommends his protégés to Thomas Brent. Brent is eager to find out who killed his master, Horace Quinn, during a séance at Quinn's house. What was Quinn desperately trying to find out from his deceased business partner, Stephen Latimer, before he was stabbed through the heart?
It seems that everyone in Quinn's household had a reason to want him dead. Can Tim and Benjamin step out of Sherlock's shadow to navigate dark secrets and unexpected dangers in their pursuit of a cold-blooded killer?

My Review:

Sherlock Holmes was such a towering figure of investigative genius that it takes not one but two men to even think of stepping into his shoes. Someday, when they’ve got a little more experience under their belts and are a bit more confident in their ability to even hold a clue-seeking magnifying glass up to the ‘Great Detective’s’ bootprints.

Sherlock meets the Irregulars in A Study in Scarlet, as illustrated by Richard Gutschmidt.

Once upon a time, and not all that long ago in the year 1895, Tim Badger was one of the many street urchins that Holmes employed as his Baker Street Irregulars, beginning in Holmes’ very first adventure, A Study in Scarlet, back in 1881.

In 1881, the Irregulars were all children – or at most teens. Inevitably, they grew up. Well, some of them at least, as the game afoot on the streets of London in the late 19th century in their circumstances was that of survival of the fittest – and the Irregulars all entered that game with the deck stacked against them.

But it’s not a surprise that one of those survivors would outgrow the Irregulars with a talent for detection and the same burning need that drove their mentor Holmes, a desire to make a living by righting wrongs and pursuing criminals. Even though there are better ways to make a living and the odds are still stacked against them.

Tim Badger is just one of those ragamuffin boys who has aged out of being invisible and now has to make a living for himself. He’s chosen to follow in his mentor’s footsteps, with the assistance of his very own Watson. But unlike Holmes’ Dr. Watson, Mr. Benjamin Watson is in every bit the same poverty-stricken circumstances as Badger.

Ben Watson is a young black man with a penchant for chemistry and an oddly assorted collection of surprisingly useful odd jobs in his past. A past that isn’t nearly as checkered as Badger’s.

Their first big case is a desperate one, and so are they, even though they’re handed that case on Holmes’ silver salver, for reasons that Badger and Watson have yet to determine. Holmes claims he’s too busy, but that’s pure balderdash and Badger knows it. For Holmes the case would be easy as pie, but for the two fledgling detectives in a race to prove that a young man was wrongfully accused of murdering his employer – it’s the chance of a lifetime.

Or the end of more lives than just their client’s, including, quite possibly, their own.

Escape Rating A-: Surprisingly and delightfully, The Isolated Séance is a story of Sherlock Holmes, of all people, paying it forward – in spite of that phrase not being in common parlance until more than a century later.

As a way of making the leap from Holmes himself to a ‘new generation’ it’s an excellent way of shifting the focus of this Holmes pastiche from the great man to a couple of young men just getting their start – as Holmes and his Watson were when they first took rooms together at 221b.

We get just enough of a glimpse of Badger and Watson’s original circumstances to see just how much the two young men are in over their heads when Holmes steps in and gives them not just a case but an astonishing hand up in their attempts to follow the path he has already broken and solve a case that is every bit as convoluted as anything Holmes himself took on.

Holmes calls his starting grant to them an investment in his legacy, and so it proves. It also helps kick the story into a higher gear as it removes many of the external impediments to their possible success, giving both the characters and the reader a chance to focus on those impediments that are inherent to the case itself and to their maturity – or rather its lack. Particularly in Badger’s case.

(Although both men are very young, Watson’s circumstances as a black man in a city that is prejudiced against him at every turn gives him a bit of caution and maturity that Badger sadly lacks. Watson’s perspective as someone who will always be considered an outsider even before he opens his mouth reminds this reader of the relationship between a young Mycroft Holmes and the more mature Cyrus Douglas in Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s Mycroft Holmes series. Please consider this a readalike recommendation as the Jabbar series is marvelous.)

The case itself is a farrago of mysterious circumstances, wild conjectures, police intractability and mistaken identity from its murderous beginning in the midst of a seance to its tragic, justly unjust ending. Elements which are present in much of Holmes’ canonical casebook as well.

But the way that Badger and Watson come to their solution – and wrestle with their consciences along the way – stands on its own merits. As do they. I look forward to watching their career continue in the second book in this series, The Mummy of Mayfair, hopefully this time next year!