No fewer than four of these tales are set in California. Will a surfer Holmes be next? Dude!
Fifteen new stories inspired by Sherlock Holmes in ways so inventively varied that Holmes and Watson appear in only one of them.
Introducing their fifth ever more wide-ranging collection, the editors indicate the principal originality of this one: The authors are all “not previously known to be friends of Holmes.” This promise is paid off in spades. Who knew that Kwei Quartey had in him a Ghana locked-room murder deftly solved by retired Superintendent Mensah Blay? Or that Joe R. Lansdale and his daughter, Kasey, could turn Holmes and Watson into a pair of female ghost hunters? Or that Maria Alexander could dream up a bride’s mother hopelessly smitten with Benedict Cumberbatch? Once the novelty of the concept has faded, the results are more inconsistent. On the whole, the entries that flaunt their cleverness—Lisa Morton’s sending a skeptical young Arthur Conan Doyle to a séance, Derek Haas’ rapid-fire deductions from a 19th-century printer’s apprentice, Robin Burcell’s investigation of whether Dr. John Watson was killed by his wife, Mary, or his partner, Dr. Joseph Bell, and especially Brad Parks’ Jersey Shore girlfriend's alternating brainy explanations and, like, totally throwaway dialogue—come off the best. Martin Edwards’ fictional review of the latest Sherlockiana by his jealous hero’s rival, Tess Gerritsen’s cheeky reevaluation of Holmes and Moriarty by their descendants, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s patient who believes he’s Sherlock Holmes, and Joe Hill’s graphic-fictional sleuth Shit-Talk Holmes all deserve honorable mention. Naomi Hirahara, David Corbett, and James Lincoln Warren update or deconstruct Holmes in ingenious ways, and James W. Ziskin features Holmes and Watson themselves.
No fewer than four of these tales are set in California. Will a surfer Holmes be next? Dude!Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-583-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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