Unquiet Spirits

Starred review from August 14, 2017
MacBird’s outstanding sequel to 2015’s Art in the Blood melds a twisty, multilayered plot with a plausible exploration of Sherlock Holmes’s life before Watson. The detective is unusually rude toward a prospective client, Isla McLaren, who seeks his help concerning a series of strange events at her husband’s ancestral home in the Scottish Highlands, Braedern Castle. A decade earlier, her mother-in-law died of exposure after being locked out of the castle. More recently, a servant fell to his death, and, a few days before Isla’s Baker Street consultation, a maid disappeared for two days before reappearing with all her hair shorn, reviving stories that Braedern Castle is haunted. Holmes refuses to help, but a request from brother Mycroft to look into an epidemic that’s devastating French vineyards, believed to be the product of British bioengineering, leads him back to the affairs of the McLarens, who are in the whiskey business. The risks that MacBird takes with her characterizations pay off and will make Sherlockians eager for more from her. Agent: Linda Langton, Langton’s International Agency.

September 15, 2017
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson tangle with murder, vinicultural sabotage, and reputed ghosts in a Scottish whisky baron's estate.Holmes, that exemplary man of science, doesn't believe in ghosts. Neither does Watson, who does believe in the hauntings of memory. Although Watson is very taken by Isla McLaren when she visits Baker Street beseeching Holmes' help in investigating the mysterious disappearance of parlormaid Fiona Paisley, who was returned to the family estate in Braedern two days later tied in a basket with her hair cut off, Holmes is clearly antagonized by the prospective client's sharp eye and sharp tongue. Holmes dismisses Isla's fear that Fiona's kidnapping and the threatening note that accompanied her return are only the latest of a string of family misfortunes that go back to the killing of her brother Donal in Khartoum and the fate of her mother, Lady Elizabeth, who froze to death after she was accidentally locked out of the manse and now allegedly haunts the East Tower. It's only after Holmes, sent to the south of France by his brother, Mycroft, to look into charges that British distillers may have deliberately introduced a nasty mite that feasts on French grapevines, is present when the severed head of the once-again-missing maid turns up in a ghoulishly unexpected way that he's moved to accept the invitation of Sir Robert McLaren. McLaren, the laird of Braedern and Isla's father-in-law, needs Holmes first to visit his estate and then to investigate a mystery whose tentacles threaten to unspool in every direction imaginable. As in Art in the Blood (2015), MacBird presents a Holmes unusually susceptible to violent emotions and actions, captures Watson's voice without undue strain, manufactures endless complications, and boldly augments the history of Holmes' early days, though the sprawling web of crimes and perpetrators inevitably leaves some loose ends dangling. Even readers who shake their heads over the unprecedented fissure that opens between Holmes and Watson will be impressed by the generosity of her plotting and the audacity with which she reimagines Holmes. A superior pastiche which, like the early work of Sena Jeter Naslund and Laurie R. King, is less interested in looking back to 1889, its nominal setting, than in refitting the Great Detective to modern sensibilities.

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