Moriarty

Everyone in the book group had finished this book but not everyone had read the short story. It doesn't honestly matter if you've not read the short story it's just an interesting additional element. We were left wondering why there was a short story in the first place.

As this is a Sherlock Holmes type of book we were all reading it looking for any red herrings or twists that had been put in to put us off the scent. We were all wondering for example who the coughing man was, was he relevant to the story etc. Having done this throughout the reading of the book when it came to the end we were left wondering if this did actually need to be a Sherlock book at all. It was a good book but it doesn't really need to be a Sherlock book. We felt that there were a lot of elements that were missing and just didn't feel quite like a Conan Doyle Sherlock book, but what was Horowitz trying to achieve with this book? Just to slightly emulate the style or to truly add another book to the Sherlock canon?

We all felt that the ending of the story was very much telling and not doing. There wasn't as much action as we were expecting especially given that some of the group had previously read some Sherlock stories and there is a certain amount of action in some of them.

Overall we gave this book 6 out of 10.

this took a long time to read but it was dead

A great book, good twist which I didn't actually pick up on at all.
I struggled to warm to the main characters, but the twist sort of explains this.
I would certainly recommend.

My reading group were very lucky to win copies of this fab book through the RGfE. Not one of us was disappointed. We thought that the characters were believable ,well constructed and managed to convey the nature of life at that period. It had an authentic Conan Doyle feel and was entertaining and gripping to the end.