This homage to the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes mysteries and his famous character didn’t quite live up to the original, in that the mystery part of the story wasn’t all that clever or surprising. However, the writing was thoroughly engaging, and the character of the elderly Holmes as seen through Chabon’s eyes-past his prime and past his time-is very clever indeed. ( )

I have a fondness for Michael Chabon based on 'Kavalier and Clay' and 'Wonder Boys', but this is hardly in the same league – it's a slight, quick read, devised mostly as a homage to Sherlock Holmes. Entertaining enough, but reads like a first draft; there was a plot there that it would only have taken a little work to develop fully. One has to wonder at – possibly admire, possibly not – the author's audacity at his choice of title. ( )

I am an unabashed Chabon fan. I will read anything he writes. That said, this was not my favorite. I appreciate a little foray into genre fiction, but the characters just did not grab me. Maybe I picked it up and put it down too often for such a slim volume. I've had friends tell me they don't like Chabon's writing after reading only this book. I sigh. I encourage them to try something else. But I cannot blame them. ( )

This is "exquisite," as several other reviewers have said. It is skillfully done, it is clever. It is deliberately old fashioned.

But I think a reader needs to ask: why write such a book? If this is entertaining, then so is the whimsy and cuteness in "Murder, She Wrote" or the delicate fake nostalgia in Merchant and Ivory films.

Late in his life, someone asked Ezra Pound to write a preface to his first book of poems, published when he was young. The early book was called "A lume spento" -- the poems were pretentious, precious, and old fashioned. Pound knew it, can said they were "stale cream puffs." I know that Chabon writes in several different styles, but I am not going to read any of his other books. Why? Because if he thinks something this artificial and concocted is entertaining, then I do not trust his taste. He can't possibly be a writer for the twenty-first century. ( )

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. ( )