This one started out really strong for me, and then petered out near the end, for a couple of reasons, which I will be marking in spoiler tags. Mary and Holmes continue to be a great pair, and I find their cerebral marriage a compelling one, though I am beginning to get a bit annoyed with King for discounting Watson so much. Here, we meet an old friend from the first book, the archaeologist Dorothy Ruskin, who shows up in Sussex for a visit, and […]
Probably my least favorite of these books.
I liked this, I did. But the first half was just an extended Holmes story (a pretty good one!), while the second half was basically pointless. I don’t think this should have been a full length novel. The content of the story just doesn’t justify it. The Valley of Fear was published in full in 1915 (after being serialized in The Strand of course), so by this point, Conan Doyle had been writing the character for almost thirty years. (This was also around the time […]
“Holmes,” I cried. “Is it really you?”
While gathering my thoughts to start writing this review, I kept getting the feeling that this was my favorite of the Holmes story collections so far. With this feeling in mind, I moseyed on over to Goodreads to look at my status updates to try to collect evidence to back it up (I rate and do mini-reviews for every story), whereupon I found to my surprise that my reaction to most of the stories was just good, not great. It’s a solid story collection! However, only two out […]
“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
So I’ve been reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels since January now, and I’ve been having a great time with the audiobooks narrated by Stephen Fry (especially since my version also has these little personal essays written by Fry at the beginning of each novel or collection). But I think I might have done myself a little disservice by listening to this one in audio. I’ve read it before, when I was in grade school I think, but the only part I remembered […]