Originally published on Set The Tape
Mysteries work well around the festive season. There’s something about being indoors, with a nice hot drink (and an open fire if you’re lucky!) and spending the day reading about people trudging through the cold and the snow trying to find the answers to a puzzle. This is something that Sherlock Holmes finds himself doing a lot across the multiple stories that have come out over the last century, and it’s something that goes well with the character. For those that enjoy this particular type of mystery book, Sherlock Holmes & The Twelve Thefts of Christmas, as the name suggests, offers more than just one mystery to get stuck into.
Things begin simply enough, when Holmes and Watson receive a Christmas gift of theatre tickets from a former client, and whilst Watson is delighted at the gift, Holmes knows that this particular client wouldn’t send such a gift, and that something else must be going on. Heading to the theatre, Holmes seems enraptured by a strange singer on stage, who soon flees. He reveals to Watson that the singer was none other than ‘The Woman’, Irene Adler, and that she had begun a mysterious game for him to solve. Thus begins a series of strange crimes and mysteries that our detective duo will need to investigate.
Sherlock Holmes & The Twelve Thefts of Christmas is not your typical Holmes book, in that it doesn’t have a single central mystery that needs solving. Instead, the book sprinkles several throughout the story, some more obvious that others. A theft of a statue from a museum, and a river running dry are two of the most obvious, yet Adler always seems to have something going on in the background that eagle-eyed readers will have to try to spot. There’s also a sub-plot about a series of mysterious packages being left to torment a pair of Norwegian polar explorers that need the pair’s attention, resulting in a story where the characters are left running ragged.
The book moves at a very brisk pace, and several of the mysteries are solved the very same chapters in which they’re introduced, leaving the reader with not a whole lot of time to try and figure things out for themselves. The quality of the mysteries varies somewhat too, with some of them barely feeling like mysteries, whilst others take up a surprising amount of space within the book. The result is a book that feels a little frantic at times, that jumps from plot to plot as Holmes obsesses about the challenge Adler has left him. Despite this, it’s an enjoyable story that puts an interesting spin on how the character approaches a mystery.
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