more librivox, more holmes. ( )

10.0

Not quite the classic of Study in Scarlet or Valley of Fear, an adventure that roams to an Indian hard labour camp, where some of the inmates get involved with jewels and crooked British Officers. ( )

The crowd-pleasing element of the Holmes stories - the detective’s astonishing ability to solve a case by piecing together scraps that, to lesser brains, wouldn’t even constitute clues - is thrown away in the first of this novel’s three sections. With Holmes having solved the murder, the second section deals with the hunt for the killer, while the final section contains the killer’s thorough and somewhat implausible confession.

What makes the novel interesting are the oddities of Holmes’s character. The book opens and closes with him taking cocaine and Watson warning him of the habit’s health risks. It’s one of the ways Holmes deals with being bored. All detectives need a quirk, of course, but this is a step up from Rebus’s boozing.
Full review: http://www.26books.com/?p=235

Interesting - but, again, the summary at the end slowed things down too much. ( )