mariellais's review against another edition
2.0
This pastiche is tedious and lacking the charm of the original stories.
The first 100 pages is split up into a long winded and bland background account of one of the main incidents of the mystery, followed by another long winded account of Watson's military service, then followed by yet another tedious summary of how Holmes and Watson met. Why even include a chapter long summary of their meeting (that's significantly longer than their first meeting in the original stories) when most of the people who will read this book already know all of this information?
The book picks up a little after the first 100 pages (when the mystery is FINALLY introduced), but the mystery just wasn't interesting enough to make me want to continue slogging my way through it. It didn't help that Donald Thomas would often have unnecessarily long paragraphs that didn't have any important information in them.
The author somehow managed to make all of the original ACD characters and the new characters boring and bland. There was zero chemistry between any of them. One of my favorite things about Sherlock Holmes pastiches is how authors show Holmes and Watson's camaraderie. I didn't get any sense of camaraderie from this book.
And as a final quip: why did the author feel the need to go out of his way to mess with the canon? Not only does he change Holmes's name, he also introduces characters earlier than they appeared in the canon and has Watson learn about Holmes's profession before he even moves in with Holmes. I don't mind if author's mess with the canon a little, but Donald Thomas went too far with this one, and doesn't even try to explain the inconsistencies that he creates.
The first 100 pages is split up into a long winded and bland background account of one of the main incidents of the mystery, followed by another long winded account of Watson's military service, then followed by yet another tedious summary of how Holmes and Watson met. Why even include a chapter long summary of their meeting (that's significantly longer than their first meeting in the original stories) when most of the people who will read this book already know all of this information?
The book picks up a little after the first 100 pages (when the mystery is FINALLY introduced), but the mystery just wasn't interesting enough to make me want to continue slogging my way through it. It didn't help that Donald Thomas would often have unnecessarily long paragraphs that didn't have any important information in them.
The author somehow managed to make all of the original ACD characters and the new characters boring and bland. There was zero chemistry between any of them. One of my favorite things about Sherlock Holmes pastiches is how authors show Holmes and Watson's camaraderie. I didn't get any sense of camaraderie from this book.
And as a final quip: why did the author feel the need to go out of his way to mess with the canon? Not only does he change Holmes's name, he also introduces characters earlier than they appeared in the canon and has Watson learn about Holmes's profession before he even moves in with Holmes. I don't mind if author's mess with the canon a little, but Donald Thomas went too far with this one, and doesn't even try to explain the inconsistencies that he creates.
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