Lacking Evil-Geniusness

I should have seen it coming. The first of this series was a best-seller, and I didn’t think it was that great. The second installment was also a NYT best-seller, and I figured maybe this one will be better. I was wrong. It was not better; if anything, Moriarty was worse than The House of Silk.

I can at least understand why people were interested in the book. They premise involves what happens immediately after Reichenbach Falls to both Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, a time-frame Conan-Doyle never really filled in, and there’s a pretty good twist at the end that I didn’t completely see coming. I’d started to suspect something was up, but not quite {spoilers}. I also have to admit that the pacing was pretty consistent. There’s nearly non-stop action or suspenseful deduction-planning next move.

There’s really only two characters, and since neither of them are that relatable. Athelney Jones is a rather luckless secondary character from the original series who only ever seems to be there in order for Holmes to have a sincere but rather useless policeman to make him (Holmes) look all the better. Here, Athelney is a once again something of an overconfident Holmes wannabe, but this time he’s in charge. Frederick Chase says he’s from the Pinkerton agency, in Europe to track down the criminal mastermind Clarence Devereux who is suspected of trying to start an alliance with Moriarty. Supposedly the whole novel is about the two trying to solve his case, but mostly it’s Chase letting Jones think he’s doing an investigation, when it’s pretty clear that Chase is the more competent and is just letting Jones think he’s doing well. In their final scene together, Chase causes something to happen that seems to happen to every post-Doyle Holmes story involving Jones. I have to admit, I don’t remember if it’s from the original series or not, but the simple fact of this repetitive fate for Jones was a little tiresome. I never really liked chase, and he’s meant to be the main character. Granted, he’s probably not supposed to be perfectly likable, but there’s really nothing nice about him, so I have to wonder why Jones seemed to get along with Chase in the first place.

I also don’t quite see how Devereux is the threat everyone seems to think he is. Chase and Jones catch up with him about 2/3 of the way through, but don’t actually catch him until towards the end. Making the villain agoraphobic is an interesting touch, I have to admit, but other than that, he’s presented mostly as an unlikable bureaucrat, not an evil genius. I don’t find it convincing for the supposed evil-genius to do nothing in the story except nearly get caught a time or two, weasel his way out of it, and then get captured and tortured at the end