cover image Moriarty

Moriarty

Anthony Horowitz. Harper, $26.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-237718-0

In this disappointing follow-up to Horowitz’s brilliant first Holmes pastiche, The House of Silk (2011), Sherlock Holmes appears only in passing, in a prologue in which narrator Frederick Chase, a Pinkerton operative, details the plot holes in Watson’s account of the fatal encounter between the great detective and the Napoleon of crime at the Reichenbach Falls in 1891. Chase is on the trail of Clarence Devereux, an American Moriarty, when news reaches him of the tragedy in Switzerland. Chase believes that Moriarty and Devereux had been in contact, and he travels immediately to Meiringen, where he winds up teaming with Scotland Yard’s Insp. Athelney Jones, who displays an unexpected gift for Sherlockian deduction. After decoding a message setting a meeting between Moriarty and Devereux at London’s Café Royal, Chase plans to impersonate the master criminal. As a pair, Jones and Chase are but a pale shadow of Holmes and Watson. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (Dec.)