The Thinking Engine

August 17, 2015
In Lovegrove's entertaining third Sherlock Holmes pastiche (after 2014's Sherlock Holmes: The Gods of War), Malcolm Quantock, a professor at Oxford's Balliol College, claims to have invented a machine that's capable of solving crimes, and Lord Knaresfield, a newspaper mogul, bets £500 that no oneânot even Holmesâcan outsmart it. The case chosen for the test, which Holmes accepts, is the deadly stabbing of Tabitha Grainger and her two daughters. The obvious suspect is Tabitha's husband, a brutish bricklayer, but he has an unshakable alibi. The thinking man and the thinking machine match wits on several more cases as a number of unrelated murders are committed in the university town. Meanwhile, Professor Moriarty's number two, Col. Sebastian Moran, has escaped custody and is on the loose. The resolution is a bit disappointing, but Lovegrove does a solid, if not superior, job of faithfully rendering Holmes and Watson.