AMAZON UK £4.10 £12.20
AMAZON US $5.48 $14.99
AMAZON CA $6.59
(A Professor & Mrs. Moriarty Mystery Book 2)
Mystery
Victorian era / Sherlock Holmes spin-off
England
It’s a daunting thing to take up a beloved story
series and add one’s own spin to it, but just as the recent Sherlock video series has reinvigorated
the visual narrative and atmosphere when viewers like me would have thought
Jeremy Brett the definitive Sherlock, so has Anna Castle shown us what might be
done in our era with the stories that got generations of readers hooked on
detective fiction in the 19th century. I was able to jump right in
with the second volume of the Moriarty series—testimony to Castle’s writing
skill.
As the tale opens, Moriarty is thoroughly domestic and
thoroughly harassed. His fussy wife is redoing their newlywed home to her
taste, harrying him from room to room and then to his club, and we wonder just
how someone as important and complex as Holmes’s nemesis could be in such
insubstantial circumstances, attached to such a fluttery creature. But then we
learn that perhaps “nemesis” is an exaggeration, and perhaps there’s another
way to look at the characters we’ve known, or thought we knew, all along.
For with pretty deft handling, we get glimpses of the
story from Book 1, and tantalizing peeks at Mrs. Moriarty’s sister, a woman of
questionable character. All that’s just in the background, though soon to be
brought into the foreground as the game comes afoot. For it seems some wealthy
women are dying at an alarming rate, and soon after their special treatment for
the nervous disorders of the Victorian era. And it seems only some wily women
might be able to infiltrate the facility—Holmes’s famous disguises just won’t
do.
The rollicking story is satisfyingly predictable, and
this easy read entices us to pick up Book 1 and to also look forward to the next in the
series.
© Cindy Rinaman Marsch
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