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SHERLOCK

Name: SHERLOCK
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
ISBN: 9781681772103

THE ESSENTIAL ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE ADVENTURES

by Arthur Conan Doyle ; edited by Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2016

Yes, it’s lovely, but since it’s neither complete nor very interestingly edited, there’s no reason to prefer this volume to...

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Given the free-wheeling approach the television series Sherlock takes to the Sacred Writings, you’d expect a selection of the Holmes stories chosen and introduced by producers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat to be equally offbeat. But you’d be wrong.

The selection itself is unexceptionable: three of the four Holmes novels—A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles—and 16 short stories—six from The Adventures, five from the Memoirs, two from The Return, and three from His Last Bow. With a few exceptions like “The Yellow Face” and “The Dying Detective,” the stories are exactly the ones most readers would have chosen themselves, from classics (“The Red-Headed League,” “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “Silver Blaze”) to overanthologized lesser cases (“The Musgrave Ritual,” “Charles Augustus Milverton,” “The Dying Detective”). Holmes dies in “The Final Problem” and duly returns to life in “The Empty House.” And surely no one would cavil at the inclusion, presumably for very different reasons, of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “A Case of Identity,” “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Speckled Band,” “The Greek Interpreter,” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” What sets this collection apart from the authoritative complete Holmes published by Oxford and Norton is the unfulfilled promise of an introduction that will link the stories to a TV series so inventive that it amounts to a Holmes remix. In lieu of such an introduction, however, the editors offer only tantalizingly brief snippets commenting on each story. (The complete introduction to “The Devil’s Foot” reads: “One of Doyle’s dips into gothic horror. Cornwall, madness, Darkest Africa, love, revenge. Lovely.”)

Yes, it’s lovely, but since it’s neither complete nor very interestingly edited, there’s no reason to prefer this volume to any of the Holmes collections out there already. Even the print is tiny.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2016

ISBN: 9781681772103

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Pegasus

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SIGN OF FOUR
by Arthur Conan Doyle & developed by Etomes Publishing

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WHITE COMPANY and SIR NIGEL
by Arthur Conan Doyle

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)