Eight Faces at Three is the latest in the reprint line of American Mystery Classics curated by Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookshop. It’s the first of a series of mystery novels by Craig Rice starring hard-drinking, hard-boiled lawyer John J. Malone, of which there were around fourteen, eventually. Holly Inglehart is found, having fainted, in the same room as her dead, disliked aunt, with all the clocks in the house stopped at 3:00. She’s arrested for the murder, but […]

The Secret Notebook of Sherlock Holmes is short, silly fun. It’s got almost 30 stories in about 90 pages, and as you can see from the math, most are only two or three pages. Some involve Holmes being surprised or not exactly distinguishing himself in deduction, but the jokes around settings and details of life in his times are amusing. Guest stars include Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Irene Norton. Holmes solves mysteries involving the queen’s dogs, a missing ambassador, […]

If you’d like to read five classic Arthur Conan Doyle mystery stories, modernized in tawdry, tabloid fashion, Charlie Milverton and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories by Charlotte Anne Walters is the book for you. For me, it was an excellent piece of evidence that putting a present-day Holmes story in print doesn’t automatically make it better than the free fic you can read on AO3. In fact, I would have enjoyed this more online, as there I would have been more […]

I wasn’t the right age for Ghostwriter, which is a shame, cause it sounds like I would have loved it. The original TV show ran 1992-1995, and it featured a group of kids solving mysteries with the aid of a ghost. Apple TV+ brought the series back a year and a half ago, as part of its service launch. To solve mysteries, the Ghostwriter team has to read books and meet characters from the stories, which is a great idea. […]

Over My Dead Body by Dave Warner has an irresistible concept (at least for me): what if Sherlock Holmes was frozen in his plunge over the Reichenbach Falls and woken in the current day? And what if he wound up working with a female descendent of Dr. Watson? It’s not an original idea, of course — there are at least two TV movies with the same premise. (The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) also uses cryogenics; the better Sherlock Holmes […]

I’m not normally a fan of urban fantasy, or fantasy in general, but if you put Sherlock Holmes in it, turns out I can’t read it quickly enough. Not that we ever see that character name, or Watson, here. Instead, it’s a personality resemblance and twists on familiar cases in a world with magic and vampires and angels. The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison is set in a Victorian world where three kinds of angels exist: those protecting […]

Inherit the Shoes is a breezy, fast-moving mystery with a Hollywood setting and a sympathetic protagonist. I expected as much — given that author E.J. Copperman has brought out any number of other enjoyable mystery series, including the Haunted Guesthouse series, the Asperger’s mysteries, the Mysterious Detective mysteries, and Agent to the Paws — and I was not disappointed. I did find the book a little slow to get started, as we have to get through necessary exposition setting up […]

Murder Is a Must by Marty Wingate is the sequel to The Bodies in the Library. As with the first, the mystery is set in a library dedicated to female mystery authors, and the murder is loosely connected to a classic mystery. In this case, it’s Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise. I loved the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and Murder Must Advertise is one of the best, as he’s at his most whimsical in it. The dilettante peer has […]