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 […]

The Bodies in the Library takes place against a background based on the long history of female-written mysteries, which is highlighted through a lead character who hasn’t read any of them. I found this an odd choice, but I loved the setting. Hayley Burke is the new curator for the First Edition Society, established when a rich woman who collected books by the women who wrote during the Golden Age of Mystery passed away. Hayley doesn’t know anything about Agatha […]

Sherlock Unlocked: Little-Known Facts About the World’s Greatest Detective, by Daniel Smith, is a lovely little gift book. It’s nice for pick-up-and-put-down reading, or dipping in and out, with 117 chapters in under 200 pages on a variety of topics. (Obviously, most topics get a few paragraphs; many of them are reminiscent of short blog posts.) Content ranges across the origins and inspirations of the characters to bits of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, with diversions into spinoffs (mostly on the […]

The first in a new series, Margaret Dumas’ Murder at the Palace hit all my cozy mystery buttons. Nora gave up her screenwriting work for marriage, but her movie star husband has just run off with his gorgeous co-star. Nora’s best friend arranges for her to move to San Francisco to run a theater that plays classic films as a way of avoiding unwanted attention. The previous manager has recently died, and soon after Nora arrives, she finds another body […]

Bones Behind the Wheel is the tenth in the Haunted Guesthouse series by E.J. Copperman, but it is also a terrific starting point, as it explains everything the reader needs to enjoy this paranormal cozy mystery. The reintroduction of the premise, key characters, and setting was much appreciated. Once you get into the double digits for a book series, that’s a must. The series is enjoyable because of its comedy — innkeeper/detective Alison is fond of the sarcastic aside in […]

E.J. Copperman’s Bird, Bath, and Beyond, the sequel to Dog Dish of Doom, is even better than the first. The mystery stars Kay Powell, theatrical agent for acting animals. She’s now repping a parrot who’s a supporting cast member of a TV procedural, playing the sidekick of a medical examiner on a show with zombie detectives. When the gorgeous actor playing the doctor is found dead, shot, in his trailer, under the cage, the real-life detectives expect a talking bird […]