THE SEVENTH BULLET

A minor item from the Sherlock Holmes canon: American socialite Carolyn Frevert brings the detective out of his Sussex retirement to reopen a real-life 1911 murder case--the assassination of her brother, premier muckraker David Graham Phillips, by a vampire-obsessed fanatic outside Gramercy Park. The case, which takes Homes and Watson to New York and back again, promises elements of homosexuality, incest, and political conspiracy; but the action, and Holmes himself, seem dim and muffled, either because first-novelist Victor restricts the detective to a dryly interrogative mode or because Dr. Watson's manuscript account of the case lay in one of those dusty archives a little too long. For faux-Holmes completists only.