The Double-A Western Detective Agency: A Holmes on the Range Mystery

Set in 1894, Edgar-finalist Hockensmith’s sixth mystery featuring Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer (after 2011’s World’s Greatest Sleuth!) triumphantly combines homage, humor, and fair-play. With the cash prize from “a sleuthing contest” they won at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Amlingmeyer brothers have set up their own business, the A.A. Western Detective Agency, in Utah. Otto is eager to tackle a case in Idaho that involves, in words typical of one of Dr. Watson’s unpublished cases, “a ghostly puma, the map to a lost silver mine, a damsel in distress and a drowned man found dead in his bed dressed as a nun.” But as that client can’t pay anything, the brothers’ business partner, Col. C. Kermit Crowe, insists that they accept a more prosaic request from someone who can, a rancher plagued by cattle thieves in the New Mexico territory. Accompanied by Crowe’s fetching and capable daughter, Diana, Otto and Gustav soon find themselves in the middle of a bitter feud and a murder investigation. Sherlockians will hope for a shorter hiatus between books in this superior series. (BookLife)