Sherlock Book Launch and Review - Sherlock Holmes and The Cornwall Affair
Posted by Steve Emecz on
Today is the launch of Joanna Reike's first UK release, Sherlock Holmes and The Cornwall Affair. Joanna is a bestselling author in the German language. Here's the first review.
Sherlock Holmes and The Cornwall Affair
This complex mystery is the first of several Sherlock Holmes adventures by Johanna Rieke to be translated from German into English, and after seeing that there are several other titles by her that still remain untranslated, I hope that they too will be available at some point.
This tale starts innocently enough: It’s September 1890, just a few months before Holmes will battle Professor Moriarty atop Reichenbach Falls and subsequently be presumed dead. He and Watson are asked by Mycroft Holmes to investigate what seems, at first, to be a rather harmless affair in Cornwall – various unusual events are occurring which might disrupt a ceremony planned to occur within the next few weeks. With that little bit of information, Our Heroes depart for the West Country.
Initially the matter seems innocent enough, and at first there is just a little bit too much dropping-in of various Wikipedia-like facts and historical nuggets about bridges, table-tops, and books, but soon this aspect fades away as Holmes’s investigation begins to uncover evidence of a much more serious series of crimes. The plot becomes increasingly complex, and all the while, as we join Holmes and Watson while they criss-cross Cornwall, we see that it’s a much deeper affair than initially suspected. As someone who has made three very extensive Holmes Pilgrimages to England, I’ve always regretted that so far I haven’t explored Cornwall, which is very much on my agenda. This book has added several very interesting-sounding locations to my ever-growing list.
The book races to an exciting conclusion that has foreshadowing to Holmes’s supposed fate at Reichenbach just a few months later, and of course the complicated mystery is explained in the end.
Where there are several places where the translations from German to English are a bit awkward, these can be overlooked when one is lost in the excitement and momentum of the story. I’m looking forward to the chance to read further Holmes adventures by this author.
David Marcum (Sherlockian editor and author has written more than sixty Sherlock Holmes stories and edited over 500).
Sherlock Holmes and The Cornwall Affair is available from this site (and we'll plant a tree as part of our #bookstotrees project) the Strand Magazine (special offer), Amazon USA, Amazon UK and all good bookstores.