Where Watson and Sherlock Solve Fantasy Mysteries

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very entertaining and somewhat flawed book. 5 stars for the fun and -1 star for the bits of disappointment. Let me explain.

This is Sherlock pastiche, with Sherlock as a kind of crow-winged angel in an England full of supernatural beings, including hellhounds, vampires, werewolves, and so on. Dr. Watson returns from Afghanistan with a spiritual and physical injury inflicted by a fallen angel and, as in the original stories, meets Sherlock and becomes his roommate. I find this combination of weirdness (though there's more, obviously) works very well. The story is told like a series of short stories, all of which are reimaginings of some of the original Sherlock stories, and they are all held together by an overall arc concerning Jack the Ripper.

The stories are clever and entertaining, both in their originality and in the way they follow the contours of familiar stories, and I'd love to see more of that. Dr. Watson figures more prominently in these than in the originals, and while Sherlock is still brilliant and capable, he's far less so in this book than we are used to seeing. However, this is balanced by a greater intimacy between the characters, which I appreciated and found very touching.

I didn't love everything. I was disappointed that Dr. Watson had a secret that seemed important but turned out to be irrelevant to the story. I kept waiting for something to come of it, but the author never used the secret for anything significant, and it felt like Chekhov's gun was never taken down and fired. (Maybe there'll be a sequel?) And the unifying arc was ended abruptly in a way that didn't reward the reader's patience. It seemed like something big was gonna happen, but instead it just got solved and packaged up in a super straightforward way, like a TV show planned for 10 episodes that gets canceled early and has to wind everything up in 7.

That said--I really liked it, and would love to read another. Lots of room in this particular universe for some fun stories.

Recommended for Sherlock fans and fantasy readers, especially those in both groups.

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