This was a great take and update on the famous Homes and Watson duo. ( )

I didn't bother finishing this. I began to get an idea of how things were going to work out at the end, did a bit of research and found that I was right. All I can say is if an author wants to play in someone else's playground, they should at least have the courtesy of remaining true to the characters. ( )

In this pastiche, Watson follows his friend into the investigation that surrounded Jack the Ripper. With lives at stake and things not as they seem, Watson must make a difficult decision.

There seem to be two groups of readers: those who thought it brilliant and those who hate it. I come somewhere in the middle, to be honest. The tone of the story is very much the Watson I've come to know from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Logically, everything falls into place. It is EASY to see the conclusion that is reached.

On the other hand, as much as I could understand the ending, it broke my heart. This was not the Holmes I know and love.

For a Holmes fan with an open mind, this is a definite read. ( )

Wow! This was entirely unexpected and really very inventive. And there's no way I'm going to be able to discuss without the most enormous plot spoilers, so if you don't want to know whodunit, look away now...

This is presented as a document of Watson's memoirs that have been stored in a vault for 50 years after his passing, such that they were opened and then published in the mid 70s. The fun thing about the presentation is that Watson makes reference to Arthur Conan Doyle and how some of his earlier memoirs came to be in print, thus not ignoring the written legacy, but explaining how these come to be written in a different voice and style.

It takes place in the 1880s and starts out with Holmes investigaing the case of Jack the Ripper. And after a while he comes to the conclusion that the crmes are being commited by Moriarty. Only, and here comes the bombshell, Watson comes to the conclusion that it is Holmes who is Jack the Ripper - and that Moriarty is a figment of a nervous dissociative disorder. Wow! I wasn't expecting that!
And from there it all progresses to a grand finale that doesn;t do anything to contradict the books by ACD himself, it's just that wheer they are based on Watson's notes of the cases maybe not all of the case notes he handed over were complete or entirely acurate.
On sheer inventiveness this gets top marks.
I listened to this on audiobook, narrated by Phillip Glennister and he did a really good job of vocalising Watson's forst person narrative and then adding Holme's comments in an apopropriate voice. It was really very very good. ( )

A full length Sherlock Holmes story, one of the many involving Jack the Ripper, and featuring Moriarty (why does seemingly almost every full length Holmes pastiche have to feature Moriarty?). Holmes's evil nemesis is used in a very unusual way here, though, and the story ends with a shocking twist which leads to a dramatic change in the chronicles of the Great Detective. I can't say any more without revealing spoilers, but I instinctively don't care for the resolution. The book is extremely well written and very authentically Conan Doylesque. There is a hilarious passage in the Introduction where Holmes takes issue with the sensationalist style in which Conan Doyle has written up one of his cases as the first Holmes story A Study in Scarlet, whereas the detective's inductive approach had preferred the rather more clinical Towards a Definitive Praxis of Applied Criminal Anthropology: Some Notes on the Stangerson-Drebber Murders of 1881! ( )