This is a whole heap of fun and inventiveness that is indeed mammoth, but is hardly repetitive. As the editor points out in his introit, the devil has all the best lines and there is something highly attractive about a smart, devious, villain. He also points out that Moriarty is mentioned in very few of the Holmes stories, and yet he is inextricably linked with that of Holmes. In this set of short stories a range of authors have taken what is related in the Holmes stories and written a Moriarty story of their own. They are certainly varied. They have different narrators, some of them by Watson, Moriarty himself or other protagonists that appear in the Holmes canon, Irene Adler narrating one story in which things do not all go Moriarty's way... In a number of the stories they look at Moriarty's past, as a school boy or young academic, or into the future, after Richenbach, and what might happen in the next generation. Of these, it is interesting that the next generation tends to be female taking over her father's mantle. Also the one story in which Moriarty is a front, the puppet master is a puppet mistress. Intriguing, as I said.
The tales themselves have different takes on the master villain. In one he is still alive and is the master spider sitting at the heart of the world wide web, in others he has forsworn crime, in one inventive story he is forever suspended in a parallel imaginary world while falling. They are not all straight victoriana, the steam punk telling was particularly inventive (and introduced me to a genre I have read very little of) although my personal favourite is the one which sets the story in the midst of HG Wells' War of the Worlds. That was a thoroughly inventive mashup of two very different stories by placing one person in both stories. Brilliantly done.
At 20 hours, this took me almost 5 weeks to listen to, but it never got dull or boring. The single narrator did a good job of maintaining consistency of accent between people who appeared in different stories. Thoroughly recommended for Holmes fans everywhere. ( )