A review by skconaghan
The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth by Leonard Goldberg

adventurous informative mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Code breaking is at the heart of all clues in the chase to recover Alistair Ainsworth, a genius chess-master code-breaker of British Intelligence during the tense years of the first world war. 
 
Another coolly delivered script recounting the latest adventure of most of the adult children found in the original Sherlock Holmes series. 
 
Our clever author has sidestepped the ‘no additional stories to the life of Sherlock’ stipulation of the Doyle Estate copyright by rewriting them anyways, and masking everyone in faces of the next generation. And he’s not strayed far from the characters, contexts, and clue-hunting strategies of the deceased Sherlock. The trouble in doing so, is that we are waiting for the astounding genius employed by Doyle—and it is yet forthcoming. Well, we can hope. Goldberg might need to stray a bit more with these promising new characters for my interest to be fully engaged. Genetics can’t be that overpowering so as the child is entirely absorbed in the idiosyncrasies and personality of the parent. 
 
There is entertainment here, and the plot is well constructed—it’s the use of carbon-copy replicas of the original characters (albeit, the continuing story of Dr. John Watson is interesting) that lacks imagination and sense of depth in relationship. I’d like to see more of their own personalities in the stories, not only the unravelling of mysteries and stellar medical analyses. 
 
That said, the accurate medical terms, descriptions of injuries, surgical procedures, and pathological insights to causes of death are the indisputable highlight on this neutral canvas of rather bland characters. 
 
Joanna Blalock (nee Holmes now Watson) smokes so much all I can smell off the page is cigarettes—it’s reminiscent of my childhood in the 70s & 80s, but then, Turkish cigarettes in the early 1900s weren’t stuffed with tar and carcinogens (still aren’t), which makes me wonder: why the blue smoke? I’m not wondering to the extent I’ll go out and experiment (though, I’m tempted)—all the talk of cigarette smoke and haze was giving me eye-burn and lung-clog. Is Joanna’s chain-smoking really necessary? But I suppose it’s 1915 and as the American Surgeon General had put his stamp of approval on fags in America... I admit, even my own grandmother, a product of the 1930s, was a prolific chain-smoker and could dangle a five-centimetre hook of burnt ash off a glowing snout, light her next off the previous, have three going at the once in different rooms of the house, and I, by some miracle, never once suffered a burn… 
 
But, if I have to hear one more time about this pretentiously intelligent woman’s ‘Mona Lisa smile’ I might throw the book… 
 
Discrepancies: I notice the ‘pants’ slip has been remedied in the 3rd novel from previous instalments in the series, and we now have proper English people calling trousers by their proper name, lest we believe grown men to be traipsing round the streets of London in their undergarments. Whew. 
 
My last beef: ‘gotten’ … never. You’ll never have heard any Brit worth his Sunday Carvery with a pint of Ale utter this word in the last millennium. We might have some young people in this new generation who have been inundated by American literature and television use the Americanised version of the past participle, but not educated upper-middle class Londoners in 1915… 
 
Other than that, I was adequately entertained for four and a half hours while cooking and cleaning.