The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter

The execution doesn’t match the concept of Miller’s middling second Sherlock Holmes pastiche (after 2021’s The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle), in which the sleuth investigates the 1890 death of Vincent van Gogh. In the prologue set years later, Dr. Watson refers to a rift, unhealed at the time of Holmes’s recent death, “brought on by his perverse fascination with spiritualism,” but there’s not even a hint at how the ultra-rational detective came to believe that one can communicate with the dead. Watson goes on to present the van Gogh case, with which he wasn’t involved. The narrator instead is another doctor, who, along with Holmes, is in France to investigate a consortium’s fears that the Parisian art world is “threatened by a criminal conspiracy,” which has replaced 12 priceless works with forgeries at the Louvre. Holmes believes that van Gogh’s death from a gunshot was not suicide and is connected to the forgery plot. While others, such as Sam Siciliano, have succeeded in presenting a plausible Holmes from a non-Watsonian perspective, Miller fails to do so. Nothing in this outing will make Sherlockians eager for a sequel. (Jan.)