Customer Reviews

The Secret of Sherlock Holmes

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Any Sherlockian will find all of the errors in this book distracting. If Boothe had done more research, it would have been a decent book.

Ignore the bad reviews! This romp is a little gem. Yes, the secret is revealed early on, but it's a stunner and introduces a character who becomes an excellent foil for Holmes. Certainly not as wayward as some pastiches, but reasonably true to the spirit of Conan Doyle. There are plenty of poor Holmes books out there, but this isn't one of them. Grab it while it's available. I await the sequel, which I understand Gary F. Boothe is now writing.

A quite awful book, every plot point requires the most unlikely coincidences and illogical behavior. Some of the errors are so silly that I read it a second time just to spot them. Here is a good one to give you a feel for the whole book. Holmes offers his guest tea and biscuits, with "plenty of good honey and butter" for the biscuits. As anyone who knows anything about the English, as apparently author Boothe does not, when an Englishman says biscuit, he means what we call in the States a cookie.

A very absorbing book for Holmes fanatics and novices alike. The characters are very well developed and interesting. (And the glossary was VERY helpful!) You'll love this book. Its elementary.

Why give a book such a sensationalistic title when the so-called secret is revealed within 20 pages? One can only presume that the author couldn't come up with something more appropriate or sought to maximise readership.

The book itself is fraught with numerous problems, including an unconvincing portrayal of Sherlock Holmes and an extraordinarily clichéd portrayal of the villain behind the events in the prologue. This latter made me wonder whether I should read any further.

In terms of it being a detective novel, the quality of the deductions is variable.

There is also an attempt to build some continuity with other non-Doyle-authored Holmes stories. While this is appreciated, I must say that the choice of 'The Seven-per-cent Solution' was rather jarring, in that while the feat of breaking Holmes' cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud is indeed chronicled in that book (as specified here), it also makes it plain that Professor Moriarty was a delusion of Holmes' drug-addled brain, whereas in this book Moriarty was truly as portrayed by Doyle. Very clumsy indeed.

Don't put this one high on your list of books to read !