THE RETURN OF MORIARTY

When the world’s most famous consulting detective and his criminal nemesis meet at the edge of Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, only one of them walks away. And not the one you might expect.

Returning in 1891 to her childhood home in Bavaria six years after she departed in disgrace to enroll in the medical school of Copenhagen University, Clara Mendel faces a chilly reception. Her beloved mother is dead. So is her stepfather, Alexander Alber. The family who remain—Alexander’s sisters, Dorothea and Margarethe; his brother, Klaus; and their father, Baron Alber—have their differences, but one belief unites them: Clara’s not really part of the family. Her stepaunts and stepuncle are especially suspicious of her financial legacy from their late brother and her motives for returning for Alexander’s exhumation. Aggrieved cousin Friedrich Alber demanded the exhumation because he claims that the bejeweled golden sword Ahnensäbel, a family treasure buried with Alexander by the grieving baron, is rightly his. But when the tomb is opened, the sword is missing. So the Albers mend fences among themselves long enough to freeze out Clara, as she apparently deserves for some long-unexplained scandal. What does all this have to do with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Moriarty? For quite a stretch, Anderson acts as if this question were pivotal, blocking out the names of the two archenemies when they appear in a letter and refusing even to allow Moriarty’s name to be uttered till long after most readers have worked out his role in the case themselves. What remains is the intricately layered saga of a deeply dysfunctional Bavarian family where both murder and Moriarty feel right at home.

Come for the title, stay for the domestic hijinks that’ll give the archcriminal a run for his money.