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Loading... The Italian Secretaryby Caleb Carr
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Reading very much like the original Sherlock Holmes stories, this short novel does an admirable job of capturing their atmosphere, humor, and idiosyncrasies. (  ) wanack | Jan 3, 2010 |  I'm not one to turn the pages so easily when it comes to Sherlock Holmes stories because of the writing style. It's not necessarily old English, but because of the formality and sentence structure, I read it very slowly to absorb what's happening. This one is a great story but it's filled with action, I was expecting a great display of Holmes's power of deductive reasoning but the way he's always subtle on things when he knows the answers is consistent. There were some dragging parts in the story and I sometimes wondered whether the scenes are interrelated but in the end, every incident would lead to an answer. Good book! (  ) yurioujo | Oct 11, 2009 | While similar in tone to the Conan Doyle works, this re-creation lacked the methodical mystery and deduction thereof. Carr gave us a synopsis and some clues and then just gave up and had the solution occur to Holmes out of the blue. There wasn’t any of his famous piecing of things together. No brilliant insights based on reason and fact; just hunches and guesswork. Sigh. I guess no one can do what Conan Doyle did. Back to the originals I go. And Watson’s style seems to have grown more verbose and flowery than I ever thought possible. The sentences were fairly choked with adjectives and adverbs. The real Watson’s style was descriptive, but pared down and readable. This was corpulent by comparison. Another thing that seemed wrong was Watson’s apparent lack of knowledge of his longtime friend. When Holmes mentioned that somehow he thought that the doings back in the 16th century might have something to do with the current mystery, he took him literally, thinking that Holmes meant ghosts. When has Holmes ever meant ghosts? He meant that the old murder was bound up in the new ones. That someone was using it as a ruse; and such proved true. How stupid of Watson. ( )1  Bookmarque | Jun 14, 2009 | Not a lot of mystery in this story.Carr, however writes about Holmes and Watson almost as well as Conan Doyle. Still a pleasant read. (  ) sogamonk | Mar 22, 2009 | A Sherlock Holmes mystery commissioned by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I thought it was one of the best books that is supposed to be like the original and yet written by a modern author. I thought it was just like a Doyle Holmes/Watson mystery. Carr got it, as far as I was concerned. Holmes brother, Mycroft, sends him a cryptic telegram inviting Holmes and Watson to come to the Queen's Royal Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, Scotland. It's supposedly haunted by the murdered Italian secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots. There have been some horrible new murders and people are saying that it's by the vengeful ghost but Mycroft is worried it may be related to foreign policies of the Queen. Holmes and Watson follow the clues to a satisfactory conclusion. (  ) Mom25dogs | Jan 11, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0312939132, Mass Market Paperback)Although Sherlock Holmes categorically dismissed, in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," supernatural explanations for corporeal crimes ("This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. ... No ghosts need apply"), one of the most popular among Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes tales is The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), in which the fate of a Devonshire family supposedly hangs on the savage appetites of an apparitional beast. More than a century later, in The Italian Secretary, Caleb Carr again presents the hawk-faced consulting detective with a yarn woven of paranormal plot threads, the mystery this time rooted in the fatal 16th-century stabbing of David Rizzio, a music teacher and confidant to Mary, Queen of Scots.For Holmes and his affable annalist, Dr. John Watson, this spirited escapade begins sometime in the late 19th century with their receipt, in London, of an encrypted telegram from Sherlock's eccentric elder brother, Mycroft, "a senior but anonymous government official." It summons them to Edinburgh, Scotland, where architect Sir Alistair Sinclair and his foreman, Dennis McKay, have been slain in the midst of rehabilitating the medieval west tower of the Royal Palace of Holyrood--the very wing where Queen Mary had lived, and where Rizzio had met his brutal, politically motivated end. Mycroft fears these murders portend new threats against Britain's present monarch--the elderly Queen Victoria, who infrequently lodges at the palace--by a known assassin, perhaps in nefarious league with the German Kaiser. En route north, Holmes and Watson are menaced aboard their train by a red-bearded bomb thrower (supposedly a rabid Scots nationalist), only to discover that still greater dangers await them, and others, at Holyroodhouse. The plaintive drone of a weeping woman, cruelly punctured and shattered corpses, a pool of blood "that never dries," and a disembodied Italian voice with unexpected musical tastes all imply the wrath of wraiths behind recent atrocities. But Holmes and Watson deduce that greed, rather than ghosts, may be to blame. Carr, who earned renown with his historical mysteries, The Alienist (1994) and The Angel of Darkness (1997), apparently intended The Italian Secretary to be a short story; however, he couldn't stop writing. The result is a fleet-footed, atmospherically gothic, and often amusing Holmes tale (with an exposition scene in Watson's bed chamber that’s truly priceless), but one that makes scant attempt to enhance our understanding of Conan Doyle's characters--a less ambitious undertaking, in that respect, than Mitch Cullin's concurrently published A Slight Trick of the Mind. And while Carr displays a gift here for adopting another author's literary techniques, it is really his own style and series players that his fans are waiting to see more of in the future. --J. Kingston Pierce (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:15:19 -0500) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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