London
1895: Sherlock Holmes’s latest client is a distraught
high court judge whose daughter has gone missing. Hannah Woolfson
was doing some detecting herself, looking for her missing
friend Sophia who had joined a mysterious cult. The Elysians
sound harmless enough, a group of intelligent people who admire
the ancient Greeks, but why do villagers have such a low opinion
of the place? More to the point, what becomes of the cultists
when they “graduate”?
This is the first of Lovegrove’s Sherlock Holmes novels
I have read and I will certainly be reading more. It is not
a short book but plenty happens in it, from the sleuth’s
foray into the Dorset countryside to the extraordinary happenings
in the cult’s headquarters. It is true that this Holmes
seems to fall more than once for the enemy’s traps,
which seems a bit out of character, but there are many good
points here to make up for this. The author has penned an
erudite tale with plenty of references to Greek mythology
and culture, and some very inventive sequences towards the
end. Anybody who grew up reading Greek myths will enjoy this
and someone new to them might well be inspired to learn more.
This is an easy book to get into, which in true Holmesian
style, hits the ground running and doesn’t stop until
the end, immersing the reader into several well described
settings and having that touch of the bizarre that trademarked
Conan Doyle’s style. I liked the intrepid heroine Hannah,
a sort of Victorian Nancy Drew who is keen to play sleuth
and, despite the fact that I did guess what was going to happen,
reading about it all was such fun. One of the better Sherlock
Holmes novels.
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