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 […]

I tried The True Adventures of Sherlock Holmes because of a recommendation from someone in my Sherlockian group. I enjoyed it so much I went wandering through the rest of the books publisher Gasogene Books has put out and decided to try a more straightforward story with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Watson Chronicles by Anne Margaret Lewis, subtitled “A Sherlock Holmes Novel in Stories”, was another great read. Six stories tell of how John Watson, a fifty-year-old in […]

Turns out that the trilogy that began with A Study in Charlotte now has four books. I read A Question of Holmes, the final, in the hopes that it would resolve some of the many tangles built up so far. (The cast became too large in the second, The Last of August. I think I read the third, The Case for Jamie, but I don’t recall much about it and definitely didn’t like it.) I was distinctly disappointed. The characters […]

The True Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Annotated Edition parodies the first set of Sherlock Holmes stories, those contained in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. There are 12 stories in that collection, some of the most famous, while there are 11 in this book by Terence Flaherty. That’s because the admittedly ridiculous “Speckled Band” gets handled in an aside. Seven of the stories first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine between 2013-2018 (and thinking of that […]