The mystery is slight and the frequently coy footnotes annoying, but there’s sturdy adventure for Sherlock-ians whose...
Prolific screenwriter, showrunner, and sometime Sherlock-ian Meyer (The Canary Trainer, 1993, etc.) returns to update the Sacred Canon once more with a previously undiscovered adventure from 1905 that might just as well have stayed hidden.
As so often in latter-day Holmes pastiches, the great detective’s brother, Mycroft, drags him into this one. Popping up at a dinner Dr. John Watson gives for Sherlock’s 50th birthday, Mycroft quietly demands a meeting the next morning at the Diogenes Club, where he shows his brother a single bloodstained page of a manuscript so incendiary that it’s already provoked the murder of Manya Lippman, Mycroft’s colleague in the Secret Intelligence Service. The manuscript, written in French, is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forged plan for world domination designed to stoke anti-Semitism that Mycroft’s determined to suppress or discredit before it can metastasize and turn a generation yet unborn against the Jews. Since the Protocols are a real-life phenomenon, not so much peculiar as monstrous, that would ultimately travel the world to be embraced by parties from Hitler to Hamas, it’s no surprise to read in Meyer’s introductory note that this adventure marks “the biggest and most consequential failure of the detective’s entire career.” But that’s not for lack of trying. Tracing the source of the monstrous hoax to Russia, Holmes travels with Watson and American translator Anna Walling across Europe to the czar’s kingdom, quickly identifies the manuscript’s vengeful creator, and extracts a written confession that it’s a forgery and a plagiarism to boot before returning on the Orient Express for a climactic episode cribbed, as Meyer’s closing Acknowledgments cheerfully admit, from Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Lady Vanishes. So many historical figures, from translator Constance Garnett to future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann, put in appearances that only the canniest readers will spot the few characters who are actually invented rather than summoned.
The mystery is slight and the frequently coy footnotes annoying, but there’s sturdy adventure for Sherlock-ians whose appetites remain unsated.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-22895-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Short chapters, paragraphs, and sentences; stilted dialogue; facile plotting; a few feeble passes at description: a...
Schematic and pedestrian, Patterson’s latest (after The Beach House, p. 519) pits Alex Cross against a trio of serial killers.
If only Alex Cross (last seen in Violets Are Blue, 200l) could retire from the Washington Police Force, as he wants to when he first appears here, having breakfast with his family. Alas, Cross’s friend John Sampson entreats the detective to take one more case, and a desultory pursuit ensues. Sampson believes the conviction of his friend, ’Nam vet Ellis Cooper, for the brutal murder of three women resulted from a frame-up. Patterson’s quick (what else?) crosscut to the killers bears Sampson out. Calling themselves “the three blind mice,” the men are hired killers unaware of the identity and motives of their employer, who, presumably, is the fourth mouse of the title. With “the clock for Ellis Cooper . . . ticking so loud,” Cross and Sampson search in vain for evidence to clear him before he is executed. The Army’s indifference to evidence that clears Cooper and points to other suspects bluntly suggests a cover-up. Then, crimes similar to the ones Copper allegedly committed follow: the three killers slaughter their victims, paint them red, and leave a straw doll at the scene of the carnage. E-mails from someone called “Foot Soldier” lead Cross to the solution, which, as Patterson makes obvious, stems from atrocities the military committed in Vietnam. Some feel-good domestic scenes (Cross’s grandma survives heart surgery) and a few hackneyed romantic interludes for Cross and Sampson break up the chase. At the closeout, the killers dispatched, Cross is planning to go to work for the FBI, suggesting a new tack for the series.
Short chapters, paragraphs, and sentences; stilted dialogue; facile plotting; a few feeble passes at description: a Patterson blue-plate special.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-69300-6
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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