Sherlock in Love

Sherlock in Love: A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars
I had heard great things about Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, and when I went to check it out from the library, I noticed a much shorter book by her, Sherlock in Love. Now, I usually delight in pastiches, even in parodies, of famous books (Shamela, anyone?) so I thought, if AW is supposed to be good, SIL should be good too! Wrong!



This books is truly terrible! Sandwiched between a somewhat intriguing beginning and a flaccid, unfulfilling end, is a ridiculous plot peppered with even more ridiculous characters.



The novel's premise is as follows: two years after Sherlock Holmes' death, the loyal (and in this book, kind of creepy and pathetic) Dr. Watson decides to write a biography of the great Holmes. Immediately, Watson begins receiving threats and his house is broken into. Somebody clearly wants Sherlock Holmes' biography to be scrapped. But why?



This is the question that drives Dr. Watson's tale. He becomes a detective in his own right - kind of. He delves into his own notebooks from decades before to find out just who - and why - might want to stop this book from being written. In his journals, he re-discovers a cast of characters so absurd doing things so stupid that I seriously contemplated setting the book down and returning to my Octavia Butler books about aliens.



Sherlock in Love could have been a success. There are the makings of a far more interesting and successful novel here - cross-dressing musical geniuses, schizophrenic European royals, cocaine habits... but nothing is cohesive, no character is endearing, and by the end of the book I didn't care who lived, who died, who was who, and why they did the senseless things they did.



To bring this to a close, I was sorely disappointed. I will still read Ahab's Wife, if only out of my love for the original Melville novel, but I strongly recommend staying far away from Sherlock in Love.


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note: I have no idea why there is so much space between parags, and I can't seem to change it. I am a code loser...