Customer Reviews

BASIL IN MEXICO (BASIL OF BAKER STREET ) (Basil of Baker Street Mystery)

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This is about as close as you'd want to come to seeing Sherlock Holmes investigating the theft of the Mona Lisa (because Basil is a bit more fun, and the history of the Mousa Lisa is more interesting).

This book is worth picking up, just for the sake of the story of how the Mousa Lisa came to be painted (I won't spoil it for you by trying to summarize it here, but it's touching). Someone has managed to substitute a forgery for the real Mousa Lisa, and the substitution was detected only due to the zeal of a visiting art expert. Basil and Dawson have been called in to track down and recover the painting, but of course things are more complicated than they seem...

Basil of Baker Street is back again! I'm a 12 year old girl who just loves this book. This one leds Basil and Dawson to Mexico to find the stolen Mousa Lisa! And it ends up were Ratigan, Basil's worst enemy, has kidnapped, or should I say mousenapped, Dawson!! Basil has to go threw thick and thin to solve this case

The mouse detective Basil aspires to be like his hero, Sherlock Holmes, and the self-aware nature of the story works beautifully, making it especially cute when Basil and Holmes contrast (Basil laps up the attention, heartily approves of Dawson's stories, and plays the violin very badly). The story's real strength lies in its writing, however; the prose is simple and even lyrical in places, and it repeatedly borrows phrases directly out of the Holmes stories themselves, adapted to suit the mice - Dawson refers to Basil as "the best and wisest mouse [he'd] ever known", while chapter 11 begins, "It is with a heavy heart that I... take pen in paw to write these lines." Aside from training up a new generation of Holmes fans, it's surprisingly educational in other ways as well, with a scattering of Spanish vocabulary and an argument between Basil and the wife of the Mexican mouse president about women's rights and famous women in history. The story is quite interesting for a children's mystery, and even adult readers are likely to find it charming, Holmes fans or not.

Basil in Mexico is about a mouse who is almost exactly like Sherlock Holmes. Wih his keen eyes and sensitive ears, nothing escapes him. Basil takes a special trip down to Mexico to solve the case of the missing "Mousa Lisa." A real thriller, this book definitely takes the cake.