The “Text Me Mystery” series brings the classic characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson into the modern era by re-telling Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery stories via text messaging. There are two books out so far, Sherlock & Watson Wired and Sherlock & Watson Re-Wired, rewritten by Ann Kimbrough. Somehow, Holmes and Watson have randomly ended up in a chat thread with four modern-day teens. The kids are bored, so in Wired, Watson begins telling them “The Adventure of […]

I was so impressed by The Fatal Folio, third in the Cambridge Bookshop mystery series by Elizabeth Penney, that I went back and read the first two. The series began with Chapter and Curse and continued with A Treacherous Tale. They’re great cozy mysteries, particularly for Anglophiles. Molly Kimball and her mother move from Vermont to Cambridge, England, after the death of her father and to help her aunt run a family bookshop, one of the oldest in the city. […]

As regular readers know, I enjoy choose-your-own-path books, particularly when they’re Sherlock Holmes-related (and even more so when they’re comics). Thus, I was curious to know more about the line of Sherlock Holmes Solo Mysteries, seven paperbacks published in 1987 and 1988. The first one is Murder at the Diogenes Club, which made me even more interested, as the Diogenes Club is where Mycroft Holmes hangs out, and he’s my favorite. Sadly, that book was incredibly disappointing. You are a […]

Can You Survive the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? combines the interactivity of a choose-your-own-path book with three classic Sherlock Holmes stories: “The Red-Headed League,” “The Speckled Band,” and to say the other would be giving things away. The reader gets to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes himself, which is fun, particularly as you can’t be too cautious. You’re told at the start that Moriarty may have sent you a case as a trap, but if you turn down too many, […]

I have just read a historical mystery that I adored! The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies stars Lady Augusta and her twin sister Julia and is set in Regency London. The two women are in their forties and unmarried, so everyone, particularly their officious brother, thinks they should be ignored. Instead, they wind up helping women who have no other option. They recover blackmail letters and set out to rescue a wife kept prisoner by her husband. Along the way, […]

I’m a fan of “Sherlock Holmes in the modern era” stories. I love the way they illustrate how the detective character is timeless while making entertainment out of the culture clash between the Victorian era and today. The latest version I’m aware of is the novel Holmes Coming, published at the end of 2022. Dr. Amy Winslow, through a complicated series of events, winds up being present when an earthquake awakens a crazy man from a steampunk laboratory. She takes […]