It’s refreshing to see Holmes be Holmes. Fans and neophytes alike should cheer Faye’s reinvigoration of Conan Doyle’s hero...
Seasoned Sherlock-ian Faye (Jane Steele, 2016, etc.) adds two new stories to 13 she’s previously published to give a synoptic overview of the career of the famed consulting detective.
Few fictional characters have been reimagined as freely as Sherlock Holmes. The iconic Victorian has been transported to Greece, India, Brazil, Tibet, Japan, and the American prairie, regressed back to his teens, turned into a woman, and played minor roles in a host of novels, including NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Mycroft Holmes. But rather than extracting Holmes from the reality of Victorian England, Faye returns the detective to his Baker Street flat and provides a steady stream of conundrums to feed his agile brain. Before him parades humanity in all its pride and pathos. A suspicious husband seeks to explain his wife’s sudden aversion to her jewelry. A taxidermist suffers the loss of a precious gem. An engaged couple claim they can use electric currents to communicate with the dead. A deranged opera singer believes he’s been kidnapped repeatedly from Hyde Park and returned to Covent Garden. The impressively varied puzzles not only provide the detective the chance to display his famed powers of deduction, but increasingly humanize Holmes by putting him more and more on the side of the angels, giving him the chance to free women from perilous unions and save innocents from deception and fraud. Faye also restores Watson to Holmes’ side and allows the relationship between the detective and his biographer to mature and mellow without altering either man’s essential character.
It’s refreshing to see Holmes be Holmes. Fans and neophytes alike should cheer Faye’s reinvigoration of Conan Doyle’s hero and his panoramic world.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2592-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reading anything by Slaughter is like riding a particularly scary amusement park ride. Reading this one is like booking a...
A plain-Jane daughter’s 31st birthday celebration explodes into a nightmare within a nightmare in Slaughter’s latest stand-alone.
Andrea Oliver’s always felt inferior to her parents. Her father, Gordon Oliver, is a trusts and estates attorney; her mother, Dr. Laura Oliver, is a speech therapist. Andy herself has never aspired to any career goal higher than serving as an assistant to someone important. Even when she left Belle Isle, Georgia, for the Big Apple, she got nowhere, and she was only too eager to return home when her mother announced three years ago that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. As the two women mark Andy’s birthday by sharing lunch in a mall cafe, a crazed shooter opens fire on a mother-and-daughter pair who’ve stopped to greet Laura, and Andy’s life changes in an instant. Or rather two instants, the first when the shots ring out and the second when Laura, after inviting the killer to shoot her next, coolly and dispassionately dispatches him. It takes the dazed Andy hours to realize that her mother’s not at all who she seems to be, and by the time she’s ready to accept the fact that Laura Oliver is a woman with a past, that past is already racing to catch up with both mother and daughter. Cutting back and forth between Andy’s harrowing flight to nowhere after Laura pushes her out of her home and a backstory 30 years earlier involving the Army of the Changing World, a cell of amateur terrorists determined to strike a mortal blow against greedy capitalists and, it eventually turns out, each other as well, Slaughter (The Good Daughter, 2017, etc.) never abates her trademark intensity, and fans will feel that the story is pumping adrenalin directly into their bloodstreams. Long before the end, though, the impostures, secret identities, hidden motives, and double-crosses will have piled up past the point of no return, leaving the tale to run on adrenalin alone.
Reading anything by Slaughter is like riding a particularly scary amusement park ride. Reading this one is like booking a season ticket on a ride that never lets you off.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243027-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans missing detective Jimmy Perez (Wild Fire, 2018, etc.) will find a worthy successor in the equally complex Venn, who...
A clever police officer in Devon, England, confronts anger and sorrow from his early life.
DI Matthew Venn was brought up by parents who were members of the Barum Brethren, a small religious sect. When he renounced his religion, he was shunned by his parents and the sect members, became a police officer, and married the love of his life, Jonathan Church, a sunny optimist who manages the Woodyard Centre, a restored factory that’s home to a covey of counseling services, artists, and charitable organizations. Venn is called from his father’s funeral by PC Ross May to investigate a corpse on the beach near Venn’s home. It’s been stripped of all ID but an envelope bearing an address in a nearby town. DS Jen Rafferty and May find a house owned by Caroline, daughter of Woodyard trustee Christopher Preece, who shares it with Gaby Henry and a short-time lodger whom Gaby identifies as Simon Walden, the body on the beach. Caroline, who works for her father’s mental health charity, felt sorry for Walden, who was living with crushing guilt from a drunken driving accident that killed a young girl, and offered him a place to stay. To Venn’s dismay, many of the suspects are involved with the Woodyard Centre. Caroline, Gaby, and Walden all worked there, Caroline’s father’s charity is housed there, and her boyfriend, Edward, is a curate who sometimes helps out. Whenever Walden rode on a bus, he always sat next to Lucy Braddick, a woman with Down syndrome who attended classes at the Centre. Walden had plenty of money, even if they can’t find it, so why was he scrimping on lodgings and transportation? A call from Venn’s mother returns him to the orbit of the Brethren after another member’s daughter with Down syndrome vanishes from the home of sect leader Dennis Salter. The search continues even as Venn ponders recusing himself from a case that hits so close to home.
Fans missing detective Jimmy Perez (Wild Fire, 2018, etc.) will find a worthy successor in the equally complex Venn, who presides over an excellent mystery in this series kickoff.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20444-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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