The cleverest stories are by Breen and Wheat, the edgiest by Estleman. A prize should be reserved for the anthologist who...
Finally, a collection of new Sherlock Holmes pastiches based on a promising idea: conflicts between the great detective’s super-rational nature and hints of the supernatural.
Conan Doyle was a great believer in spiritualism, especially as his life drew to a close. Yet despite numerous red herrings, he never allowed any supernatural incidents or explanations into the Holmes canon. Greenberg and Co. (Murder in Baker Street, 2001, etc.) have enlisted ten contributors eager to make up this deficit, either by providing Holmes with an apparently ghostly apparition that turns out to have a rational explanation (Jon L. Breen, Gillian Linscott, Carolyn Wheat, H. Paul Jeffers, Colin Bruce) or by posing a problem with alternative explanations, natural and supernatural (Loren D. Estleman, Paula Cohen, Bill Crider, co-editor Stashower). Both types straddle the line between this world and the next, but Michéal and Clare Breathnach introduce Yeats and Lady Gregory in a tale that balances even more precariously on the line between the two types. The roster is rounded out by a pair of autobiographical/critical reflections by Estleman and Caleb Carr and by Barbara Roden’s more substantial and valuable survey of supernatural detectives—a line that now, for better or worse, includes Holmes.
The cleverest stories are by Breen and Wheat, the edgiest by Estleman. A prize should be reserved for the anthologist who comes up with a higher concept than this one.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1400-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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