[books 2016] Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?
Jul. 10th, 2016 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulroAnd I appear to have exceeded the allowed number of tags on LJ, so from now on I can only use ones I've used before.
30. Who Killed Sherlock Holmes by Paul Cornell
Regular readers will know that I have been eagerly awaiting this one. Paul Cornell's Shadow Police novels are my very favourite supernatural detective series, mainly because they are straight up horror in a police setting, and an exercise in what smart people do when presented with the supernatural.
In Cornell's London, whatever London remembers is real, so Sherlock Holmes is one of the ghosts of London. One of the detectives, Sefton, has a dream that Sherlock Holmes has been killed, rushes to the Holmes museum at 221B, and finds a body that only those who have the Sight can see.
This coincides (or not) with three separate Sherlock Holmes films/TV shows being shot in London, and grisly deaths of people who have ever played Sherlock Holmes, in ways that make increasingly less sense.
Meanwhile, the data analyst Ross is on a quest to recover her lifetime's happiness (which she had to sacrifice in the last book to buy a crucial clue - one of the singular darkest things I've ever read), and Lofthouse, the senior office who doesn't know why she knows about the Shadow Police, finds out more about her past and how she came to be involved in all this. These are easily the best parts of the book.
I loved every second of it. Still not as much as London Falling, but it will be extremely difficult to beat that.
30. Who Killed Sherlock Holmes by Paul Cornell
Regular readers will know that I have been eagerly awaiting this one. Paul Cornell's Shadow Police novels are my very favourite supernatural detective series, mainly because they are straight up horror in a police setting, and an exercise in what smart people do when presented with the supernatural.
In Cornell's London, whatever London remembers is real, so Sherlock Holmes is one of the ghosts of London. One of the detectives, Sefton, has a dream that Sherlock Holmes has been killed, rushes to the Holmes museum at 221B, and finds a body that only those who have the Sight can see.
This coincides (or not) with three separate Sherlock Holmes films/TV shows being shot in London, and grisly deaths of people who have ever played Sherlock Holmes, in ways that make increasingly less sense.
Meanwhile, the data analyst Ross is on a quest to recover her lifetime's happiness (which she had to sacrifice in the last book to buy a crucial clue - one of the singular darkest things I've ever read), and Lofthouse, the senior office who doesn't know why she knows about the Shadow Police, finds out more about her past and how she came to be involved in all this. These are easily the best parts of the book.
I loved every second of it. Still not as much as London Falling, but it will be extremely difficult to beat that.
