After his weak debut, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra
(2002), which pitted the master sleuth against a race of intelligent rat-men, Vanneman provides a more convincing adventure for Holmes and Watson—a swashbuckling tale of international intrigue centered on a valuable diamond and mysterious Austrian nobles who may be involved in multiple murders. As before, however, the book goes on too long. When Winston Churchill enlists the aid of the Baker Street duo in tracing a man posing as an archduke, Cecil Rhodes summarily dismisses them from the case. Rhodes proceeds to fix a coroner's inquest, thus thwarting them from independently pursuing justice. Years later, the pair resumes the now-cold trail across Europe, accompanied by a reformed street urchin who's been adopted by the good doctor. Offstage much of the time, Holmes employs his spying and burglary skills more than his deductive abilities. Though the author ingeniously adds to the canon by having Watson serve, like Conan Doyle, as a field surgeon during the Boer War, he undermines this plausible twist by once again spending many pages detailing Watson's amorous pursuits ("she grasped me by the most shameless of handles"), a far cry from Doyle's Victorian reticence and a pattern that won't endear his pastiches to proper Sherlockians. (Feb. 2)
