Moriarty Returns a Letter

Starred review from November 11, 2013
You don’t have to be a Sherlockian to enjoy Robertson’s excellent fourth Baker Street mystery (after 2013’s The Baker Street Translation). Early chapters, including one set in 1893 in which a Pinkerton agent attempts to save his own life by claiming to be Professor Moriarty, set the groundwork for the well-constructed plot that follows. In the book’s present-day of 1998, London barrister Reggie Heath, who leases 221B Baker Street on condition that he deal with letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, is still recovering months later from the trauma of having been the target of “schizophrenic savant” Darla Rennie, who believed he was actually Holmes. Blaming Heath for the death of her notorious ancestor, Professor Moriarty, Rennie kidnapped Heath’s love interest, Laura Rankin, before apparently falling to her death in the Thames. Robertson does a nice job of playing with the notion that both Holmes and Moriarty were real in an entry that exhibits the rich possibilities of his premise. Agent: Kirby Kim, William Morris Endeavor.

January 15, 2014
More trouble for the Sherlock Holmes letters and the curators who love them not wisely but too well. A century and more ago, a brave undercover Pinkerton operative pretended to be professor Moriarty in a last-ditch attempt to prevent crime lord extraordinaire Redgil from executing him. Fifty years later, the operative's son, Capt. James Moriarty of the U.S. Army, lost his life when a London pub was bombed. Now, in 1998, the nuptials of actress Laura Rankin and Reggie Heath, Q.C., whose sideline is answering the letters still addressed to Sherlock Holmes, are complicated--well, virtually trashed--by the miraculous escape from death of schizophrenic savant Darla Rennie from the mangled car in which she'd kidnapped Laura and by a new exhibit of Holmes letters quickly installed and then even more quickly pulled from Dorset House--but not in time to prevent a new malefactor from noticing evidence of a sinister secret that must be protected at all costs from Reggie and his brother Nigel, a blandly inoffensive solicitor who was once in group therapy with Darla. The two brothers, surely the most reluctant detective duo in fiction, wend their way through a thicket of false identities, hairsbreadth escapes, Sherlock-ian references and Wodehouse-ian dialogue to end with the tableau of two mortal enemies locked in hand-to-hand combat hurtling over a cliff. Hmm. Robertson (The Baker Street Translation, 2013, etc.) extracts another ebullient puzzle from the most improbable yet thoroughly logical sources imaginable.

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January 1, 2014

Present-day brothers Reggie and Nigel answer Sherlock Holmes-related correspondence since their law practice is at 221 Baker Street. This time, a case transcends reality and puts the brothers in danger. Sherlockians will grab this fourth entry (after The Baker Street Translation).

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2013
Robertson has amassed good mileageand some really good novelsout of the world's endless fascination with Sherlock Holmes, going well beyond the old chestnut of claiming to have come across a mislaid Watson manuscript. Robertson's protagonists are a couple of drily funny British lawyers who work out of offices at 221B Baker Street. They get sacks of mail from people who believe Holmes is real. Occasionally, a letter will pique their interest and send them off on the trail of a miscreant. The novels began as wonderful mixes of suspense, detection, and muddle-through comedy, though the tone darkened as the series went on. This latest has gone grim. It begins with the whipping of a half-naked man with a knotted rope, then moves to a bombing death, and the entry of the flippant heroes halfway through doesn't lighten the tone. There's a subtext here: the evil is loosed because gullible people believed, like the letter writers, that Holmes existed. The novel can be read as a warning against believing in fairy tales, or simply as an artfully done mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)