Rating: 3 stars
Cover synopsis: A murder that takes place in the shadowy outskirts of London, in a locked room where the haunting word Rache is written upon the wall. Quickly picking up the "scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life," Holmes does not fail at finding the truth -- and making literary history.
I was excited to read this book, because I've been watching the British Sherlock Holmes miniseries on Netflix, and I've enjoyed it immensely. It takes Doyle's actual stories of Sherlock Holmes, and transplants them into the 21st Century. The acting is wonderful and the writing is smart.
However, I found this book tough to rate. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. They are a fascinating pair, comical yet brilliant. But the book has a 5-chapter flashback to the killer's background which reveals Doyle's ignorance on Mormonism. He perpetrate falsehoods on the religion -- my religion. And it made me very uncomfortable!
And I'm not sure the Utah interlude added a whole lot to the story.
So. If you excise the lies in those 5 chapters, this would border on a 5-star book. The characters are vivid, fully fleshed, and a pleasure for the reader to decipher. But for Doyle's part in spreading anti-Mormon sentiment, I was sorely disappointed. (Thankfully, the mini-series adaptation of this story had nothing to do with Mormons!)
