A welcome addition to the growing canon of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs. We discover Holmes during World War Two - a curmudgeonly character with creaky bones is brought out of quiet retirement by a mute German Jewish boy with a pet bird that parrots numbers apparently in code, and the spies and the murder that inevitably follows.
A well structured story with a delightful denoument. The author perhaps tries too hard to be literate in his writing which makes the work a slightly difficult read (such very long sentences with lots of commas that I sometimes lost the thread of the sentence and had to re-read it). However some of the passages are so poetically descriptive as to make one forgive all.
It is a short work - I polished it off in about three hours. But a little gem. ( )

A geriatric Sherlock Holes, eh? I can imagine him whiling away his retirement years tending his bees, & becoming more cantankerous with each passing year. An interesting little mystery. I can hear those trains passing... ( )

In "The Final Solution," Michael Chabon gives us the story of the world-famous detective cracking the case of the interrogated parrot. It turns out someone did the parrot's owner in, and was questioning the parrot. It turns out the parrot knew and could recite rail car numbers of Jews being transported in the camps in the Final Solution. The "world famous detective" is not identified in the book, but no doubt is left before you finish. Conan Doyle's hero cannot be mistaken.

This is a haunting little story, with a favorable ending; it's a sweet confection weighted with heavy themes. I enjoyed Chabon quite a bit at this length. "Kavalier and Clay" is too long. ( )

A lovely novel, but very slight - about 110p., all told. An aging retired detective tries to track down a young boy's missing parrot.

But the story is a little more complex; when the parrot went missing, a man was murdered; the boy is a refugee from Nazi Germany; the parrot continually recites a long string of numbers in German. And the detective... well, the detective is ninety, keeps bees, and labours under the weight of people remembering his legend.

Two elements stood out; the first was the chapter written from the perspective of the parrot, which was very well executed, and the second was that the two biggest questions are never answered - the old man is never actually named, and we're never told quite what the numbers signify - which fits in well with the vague driftiness of the whole thing.

On the whole, it was a nice diversion for an hour or two; meandering, but nicely written meandering. Not sure it was quite worth charging eightpence a page for, though.

Short detective story with echoes of Sherlock Holmes. Entertaining but not as good as Conan Doyle... ( )