Saturday, January 07, 2017

Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz: interesting but unsatisfying thriller

Sherlock Holmes is dead. 
Days after Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty fall to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls, Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase arrives from New York. The death of Moriarty has created a poisonous vacuum which has been swiftly filled by a fiendish new criminal mastermind.
Ably assisted by Inspector Athelney Jones, a devoted student of Holmes's methods of investigation and deduction, Chase must hunt down this shadowy figure, a man much feared but seldom seen, a man determined to engulf London in a tide of murder and menace. 
The game is afoot . . .


My review:

Having loved the first book in this series, The House of Silk (well worth a read if you've not done so already), I was really looking forward to this follow up and read the whole story very quickly as a result. It's not entirely what I expected - yes, the description is fabulous and you do really feel as if you're walking through Victorian London with all the sights, sounds and smells that entails. The plot is also first-rate.

However, neither Holmes nor Watson appear in the novel until the very end (via a curious short story addendum) and there is therefore a great sense of frustration. The level of violence is also more than is necessary to my mind and I didn't need to have such detailed descriptions of it. The ultimate twist is good, but not what I hoped for and the end is ultimately very unsatisfying indeed. If there's a third book, then we do really need to have Holmes and Watson in it! Please?...

Anne Brooke Books

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