A treat for Holmes enthusiasts looking for a brisk and satisfying holiday read.
A holiday-themed Sherlock Holmes mystery story, told in the classic style.
On Christmas morning in 1902, Dr. John Watson visits his old friend the consulting detective at 221B Baker St. to ask him to join him and his wife for Christmas dinner. Upon unwrapping a gift from Holmes—a bottle of Beaune, an elegant pinot noir—Watson discovers that the bottle’s contents have been emptied and replaced with a mysterious dark sand; the container’s also been stoppered with a handkerchief belonging to none other than the new king of England. Suspecting this to be the work of a new foe, Holmes immediately sets out to enlist the help of his brother, Mycroft, and Inspector Lestrade while keeping Watson in tow. They’re all determined to unravel the mystery—and keep the royal family from harm. Matthews published One Must Tell the Bees, another Sherlock Holmes novel, just last year. This one is written in the manner of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales and reads as a loving tribute, showcasing a mastery of characters and setting that indicates reverent study; for instance, narrator Watson, upon entering Holmes’ room, nostalgically describes its scent as “a unique mixture of noxious chemical vapours, the sooty fragrance of a coal fire in the grate, and the sulphurous aroma of gunpowder, with a foul hint of stale tobacco smoke.” The prose beautifully evokes Edwardian London at Christmastime, and the author makes sure that several familiar supporting characters, such as Kitty Winter and Shinwell Johnson, are present. The pacing is swift but even, with a twist at the end that’s sure to please genre fans. Most importantly, the author depicts the two main players authentically, showcasing Holmes’ quirks and Watson’s steadfast loyalty. This work isn’t treading any new ground, but fans of Doyle’s work will delight in its familiarity.
A treat for Holmes enthusiasts looking for a brisk and satisfying holiday read.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1736678350
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Not Making This Up LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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