John Lawrence (12)

Sherlock Holmes is a literary character we can’t get enough of. Doyle famously tried to quit him to devote himself to more “literary” projects, only to cave to fan demand and rescue Sherlock from the Reichenbach Falls. Even Doyle’s own death couldn’t end the career of the super sleuth. Countless additional tales have appeared, most notably by Nicholas Meyer, who brought Holmes into contact with Freud and Jack the Ripper.

The only mystery to solve here is why it took so long to send show more Holmes and his intrepid chronicler Watson to the scene of the most scandalous locked-room mystery in the nineteenth century, to a hunting lodge outside Vienna, where the bodies of the Habsburg crown prince, Rudolf, and his seventeen-year-old paramour, Baroness Mary Vetsera, are discovered.

Lawrence does a good job of evoking the gilded splendor of the Hofburg, and his depiction of Holmes and Watson is nearly pitch-perfect (it would have been so even if he didn’t have Holmes say “the game is afoot”). Less probable is getting Mycroft out of the Diogenes Club, even less so, the frequent reference by court figures to Mary by name, when they most certainly would have referred to her by her title alone, the baroness.

Lawrence offers an intriguing alternate history for the tragic event and presents it in a fleet-footed plot that I consumed in one day.

Sadly, the book contains numerous typos, formatting errors, and wrong or missing words. If the author wasn’t capable of doing his own proof-reading (most aren’t), he should have enlisted the services of one who could before uploading his file to the print-on-demand service he used. It would probably require paying a second set-up fee, but I would recommend that the author submit a revised file to spare future readers the aggravation I experienced. All the more so, since, based on plot and characterization, this book deserves deuterocanonical status in the Sherlock Holmes corpus. show less