Sherlock
Holmes and Dr Watson receive
a visit from an agitated man one morning in 1895. Ronald Temple’s
young child has been kidnapped, although oddly no ransom has
been demanded and the boy seems to have vanished. Holmes is
not optimistic as there appear to be no leads, but the Temples
have not been completely truthful. Soon a connection to the
Royal family is discovered, and links with the Ripper murders
a decade earlier. The pair must act fast if they are not going
to pay with their lives for their investigations.
Unlike in the original stories Watson does not narrate the
whole book but shares his chapters with those written in a
third person viewpoint. This gives readers a chance to see
what is going on when Watson is not around, and it is a personal
preference mostly if this is preferred to the original style
or not. The novel follows the classic Holmes format with the
pair receiving a guest with a mystery and then following clues
complete with disguises, captures and a slight twist of the
unusual. More of the latter would have been even better as
the touches of the bizarre are what raise the original tales
from very good to great. As it is, this is an entertaining
and in some places even exciting story but with nothing much
to mark it out as special. This in itself is not a bad thing
as surely the main reason for reading these “pastiches”
is to have more quintessential Holmes and Watson and Mr. Davies
writes a pacy tale with no room for treading water. I would
read more by this author.
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