Sherlock Holmes and the Swedish Enigma

March 12, 2012
The pseudonymous Grant’s third novel featuring a defrosted 21st-century Holmes (after 2011’s Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter) offers an intriguing riff on The Hound of the Baskervilles, though Grant’s interpretation of Holmes isn’t as sophisticated as the contemporary version in the BBC-TV series Sherlock. A policeman descendant of Inspector Lestrade comes to Holmes and his Watson-like sidekick, James Wilson, with a case presenting “features of interest” that are catnip to the master sleuth. A larger-than-life-sized statue of Aphrodite was stolen from the house of a London lawyer, whose pet macaw was left decapitated and hanging from its perch. Another statue has also vanished from a historian’s residence, along with his daughter, the family dog, and two pieces of cake. Clues in the burglaries take the faithful Wilson to Cornwall to observe and report. While the denouement doesn’t quite live up to the tantalizing puzzles, this is a major improvement over the often improbable second book. Agent: Al Longden, Albert Longden Associates.

March 1, 2012
When the famed consulting detectivewho, you will remember from earlier installments in the series (Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter, 2011), was frozen in his own time and thawed out in the present dayis presented with a series of unusual incidents, his interest is captured by, of all things, the theft of two slices of Black Forest cake. This leads him into a case involving stolen statuary, murder, and his modern-day nemesis, Lars Lindblad, who is as fiendishly clever as the long-gone Professor Moriarty. Grant's Holmes novels (this is the third) are not pastiches but full-fledged mysteries, almost as if Conan Doyle were living today and still writing about Holmes. In addition, the juxtaposition of Holmes' nineteenth-century sensibilities against the twenty-first-century world provides the author with some excellent opportunities to examine Holmes from hitherto unexplored angles (access to e-mail, for example). The book's narrator, former journalist James Wilson, is not merely a stand-in for Dr. Watson but a well-designed and engaging character in his own right. Devout Sherlockians will have quibbles, of course, but it's hard to deny this series' sheer entertainment value.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)