The author who brought Holmes and Watson to Minnesota (Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon, 1996) is at it again, this time...

READ REVIEW

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE ICE PALACE MURDERS

The author who brought Holmes and Watson to Minnesota (Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon, 1996) is at it again, this time sending them to St. Paul for the 1896 Winter Carnival, from which merchant prince George Upton's son Jonathan has vanished. Jonathan, about to be married to beautiful northwestern heiress Laura Forbes, was last seen in the Ice Palace, whose gloomy magnificence is an annual celebration of winter's power, and it's in the Ice Palace that Holmes and Watson find a decisively grisly clue. Joined by Shadwell Rafferty, the enormous Irish saloon-keeper/detective Upton Senior has already hired and fired, Holmes and Watson, rebuffed in their attempts to interview George Upton, Laura's father Cadwallader Forbes, Forbes factotum Jedediah Lapham, and scurvy Chief of Detectives John J. O'Connor, embark on an increasingly dangerous series of adventures that will pit them against a one-eared bandit, the frozen Mississippi River, and the sinister architects of the notorious Muskrat Club. Caught in the heat of passion, Millett's Watson will continue to write like a yellow journalist, while Millett's Holmes will indulge in such un-Sherlockian activities as safecracking, speaking Swedish, building a ship in a bottle, playing the pipe organ, and telling Rafferty to shut up. A rattling good mystery with a well-hidden villain, if only you can ignore the fact that the heroes are supposed to be Holmes and Watson.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0816674825

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998