Quinn FawcettCritiques

A European prince has been placed in the care of Mycroft Holmes to get home safely. After narrowly escaping one assassination attempt, it is decided that while two decoys fan out, the prince, holmes and Guthrie will quietly take the fastest luxury train from London to Edinburgh. Once onboard, the danger is as strong as ever and when a passenger is murdered, Holmes must determine if it is happenchance or something more sinister.

By book three, I really shouldn't be surprised at an active Mycroft Holmes, but it really does. It was also disconcerting when he said his brother would be able to make more of some details than he would! Not an admission I would expect from acknowledged more intelligent Holmes brother.

The plot was intriguing. For the majority of the narrative, the characters are confined to the interior of the train. Once the first murder occurs on the train, there is an air of tension. Who is the killer? Is he a member of the mysterious and dangerous Brotherhood? the train is behind schedule. Will this be to their benefit or detriment? This keeps the pace fast.

Guthrie manages to get himself into a major scrape and there is a very "James Bone"esque sequence of him trying to get back on the train. It was a little tiresome to have him insist he has no interest in Miss Gatsby, so it was a relief to have him finally admit he is attracted to the Golden Lodge agent.

Overall, this was a nice addition to the series. i would recommend it to readers who have read the first two and enjoyed them. This is not a series to jump into the middle.

Interesting story, but a bit slow.

Paterson Guthrie is Mycroft Holmes' secretary. When an international crisis arises, Guthrie is sent out to infiltrate a dangerous group. It will take all of Guthrie's determination and wits to get him safely through this.

I was intrigued when I learned there was a series of books about Mycroft Holmes, a character we see so seldom in the originally Sherlock Holmes' stories. It was a bit of a shock to read of this man who had been described as "seldom leaving the Diogenes club" to travel incognito to see a matter accomplished in the best outcome.

There are bits of this story that take a strong stomach. Guthrie witnesses a brutal murder. he fights for his life, killing a man in the process. So for those of you who would prefer not to read such things, take warning!

Overall, I did enjoy it and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

A quick read for individuals who like mysteries and can handle gruesome torture. It's the first in a series about Mycroft Holmes, the mysterious brother of Sherlock. I'm always skeptical about Holmes rewrites, but this one manages to be a good mystery without treading too closely in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's shoes. Mycroft of this series is not the Mycroft of the original, but if you can allow that he is a new character, he is well written in a tale of international intrigue more than mystery.

I picked up this book because of the connection with Mycroft Holmes. I have enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes stories in the past and found Mycroft and interesting character too.

I enjoyed the description of the era and the behaviour of the characters for that time. Also the deductive reasoning of the characters and some of the complications of the events and actions of the characters.

The parts where there was quite a bit of explanation and reasoning about the political and historical happenings seemed a bit on the long side at times and made the flow to stagnate. I realize that the information was part of the story line and gave background and importance to the current action of the plot.

I did enjoy the book and plan to read the other three books of this series at some time.

I have long been a devout Holmes fan, and having proceeded faithfully through the original canon many pleasurable times, I began reading pastiches, homages, and various renditions of the Greatest Detective; naturally, a series about Mycroft Holmes was bound to catch my attention. Part of the charm of Sherlock Holmes is his eccentricities, buffered by the much more staid and ordinary Doctor Watson. When we meet his brother, Mycroft Holmes, in the two stories he appeared in, he seems to be even more eccentric than his brother. He is profoundly intelligent, even more so than his extraordinary younger brother, lazy, antisocial (the Diogenes Club, of which he is a founding member, is famous for being the most unsociable social club in England), and happens to nearly single-handedly run the government from his quarters on Pall Mall. Sherlock himself described his brother’s duties: “All men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.”

Anyone could see why I was intrigued to read an entire series about him.

Unfortunately, Fawcett’s Mycroft bears little resemblance to the one we were shown glimpses of in Doyle’s canon – he is active, social, and rarely shows any eccentricity. His intelligence is prosaic, heard about but rarely demonstrated; there are only a few deductions sprinkled about, and rarely explained or clever. The book is narrated by an original character, Guthrie, an assistant to Mycroft, who is bland as white bread. As I said, Watson’s ordinariness aptly balances Sherlock’s eccentricity, but here, Mycroft is not eccentric enough to justify Guthrie’s dull nature. Had Fawcett chosen to employ a more Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin dynamic with Mycroft and his secretary, it would have been much more canonical and, quite frankly, made me more charitably disposed to the original character of Guthrie.

Instead, Mycroft himself is remarkably active and cuts a James-Bond-thriller-esque figure. I rather took him running the government as testament to his vast capacity for deducing embarrassing information on diplomats and an encyclopedic knowledge of treaties, diplomats’ foibles, and the cost of corn on the market, rather than engaging in bizarre plots perpetrated by an ancient brotherhood.

Which brings me, of course, to the case - an odd one to choose, rife as it is with elements of the supernatural and superstitious. Doyle was famously interested in such notions, but to his credit, they never crept into his Sherlock stories. Here it feels very odd, and while I do not assert that it could not be done, I think it is a very poor choice for a first novel. We are thrust into the point of view of a new character whom we know very little about, a Mycroft who seems very much foreign to what little we do know of his character from Doyle, and into a mystery that does not at all ring familiar. Additionally, it seems that the pacing is off – I felt as if I were starting in media res without any prelude or introductions whatsoever.

It would have been a problem if Fawcett had tread too carefully in Doyle’s footsteps, but he seems to have erred in the other direction too far.

Fawcett himself is a very good writer, with solid prose and dialogue that doesn’t sound forced. I do have a minor quibble that apparently every single statement had to have an explanation attached to it, which got very tiresome after a while. (Example: “Really?” I asked, endeavoring to make it sound as if this were the first I had heard of it).

If this had been an original novel, I might have enjoyed it. As a series purporting to be about Mycroft Holmes? I’ll pass.

I've always wondered if books like this one fall under the "fan fiction" category?
Anyway, here you get to follow Sherlock's brother through some international intrigue. An ok story and really just worth reading to flesh out some of Doyle's secondary characters.
Mystery buffs will dig it the most.

hb

The first of a four-book series starring Sherlock Holmes’ older brother, Mycroft... Fawcett’s Mycroft is certainly not slender of physique, but neither is he the portly individual described by Doyle. He is often out and about, which is pretty much the opposite of Doyle’s creation... After four novels, Fawcett switched his efforts to tales about Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). I think that was sensible. [Bob Byrne]