The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlockians may have a tough time buying into the conceit of Goldberg’s whimsical series launch—that Sherlock Holmes had a brilliant secret daughter, Joanna Blalock (perhaps related to Goldberg’s L.A. forensic pathologist character of the same name), who was a practicing nurse and solved crimes with Dr. Watson’s son, Dr. John Watson Jr. In 1910, seven years after Holmes’s death, Charles Harrelston takes a fatal fall from a London rooftop after playing cards with a gambler, Christopher Moran, to whom he was in debt. The dead man’s sister, Mary, asks the elder Watson to prove her sibling was not a suicide. The name Moran rings a bell with Watson senior, but the otherwise astute doctor takes a long time to make the link to Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s lieutenant. Charles’s widowed sister-in-law, Joanna, and the younger Watson wind up doing most of the sleuthing. Readers who don’t mind highly irreverent takes on Conan Doyle’s original adventures will be most amused. [em]Agent: Scott Mendel, Mendel Media Group. (June) [/em]