In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

Starred review from September 8, 2014
Devotees of the greatest of all fictional detectives will welcome this anthology from King and Klinger (A Study in Sherlock), who have assembled a murderers’ row of talent, including bestselling authors not usually associated with Holmes and Watson. Only two stories are traditional pastiches; the other 13 pay homage to the spirit of the originals in very different ways. Michael Connelly’s “The Crooked Man,” in which Harry Bosch consults a coroner named Art Doyle, cleverly riffs on Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Crooked Man.”A brilliant bipolar patient puts his gifts for Holmesian deduction to use while tracking a serial killer in Jeffrey Deaver’s “The Adventure of the Laughing Fisherman.” Cornelia Funke provides insights into Holmes’s youth in her moving “Lost Boys,” while an elderly Holmes plays a heroic role during WWII in John Lescroart’s stirring “Dunkirk.” Klinger himself weighs in with one of the more memorable entries, “The Closing,” which offers a sophisticated variation on one of the most tragic canonical adventures. According to the editors’ illuminating introduction, a similarly themed second volume is in the works.