Sherlock Book Review - Sherlock Holmes and The Hearthstone Manuscript
Posted by Steve Emecz on
Daniel D. Victor has been writing Holmes pastiches since the early 1990’s – first a novel, “The Seventh Bullet” (1992), and then a number of short stories (many in “The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories”). But he truly found his Inner Watson with his literary-themed Holmes novels (his “Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati” series). Now he returns with his next entry, wherein Holmes and Watson meet Hamlin Garland, the “Dean of American Letters” – and it’s no surprise that Garland has a case which only Sherlock Holmes can solve. And like many of Victor’s other Literati books, we see where the true facts of Holmes’s investigation served as the jumping-off place for a later more-famous fictionalized version of the case.
Once again, this book proved that Daniel D. Victor is one of the best today at reaching into Watson’s Tin Dispatch Box and pulling out a winner of a story that one can read without having to worry that things might go off into the weeds – no Lovecraftian monsters or Victorian steampunk mechs here, thanks very much. I can’t wait until his next one.
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During his first trip to England in 1899, murder was the last thing that Hamlin Garland, the so-called "Dean of American Letters," expected to find. More predictable were his descriptions of American baseball and visits with notables like Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw. Yet when Garland tells Sherlock Holmes of a suspicious death that occurred at Hearthstone Hall, the detective replies, "You have described the ingredients of a classic murder mystery-a dead dowager empress and a collection of courtiers any one of whom might be the killer." From the ominous confines of a gothic manor house to the foreboding terrain of the Devil's Punchbowl, Garland, Holmes, and Dr. Watson seek to thwart a cold-blooded killer before the list of victims expands any further.