The House of Silk: A Sherlock Holmes Novel

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Exciting story with an absolutely excellent narrator who makes all the characters seem so authentic. A book firmly rooted in the style of Doyle, faithful to the character as created and with just enough wiggle room to allow the author to say all the things he's been longing to say about the world of 221B Baker Street. I sometimes wonder how I will be able to find the energy or the will to undertake another investigation if I am not assured that the general public will be able to read every detail of it in due course.Meanwhile, Watson meets with a mystery criminal, later revealed as Professor Moriarty, who provides him with a key to free Holmes from prison, before the detective can be assassinated. There is a deep sense of the social concerns, and shocking depravities that were allowed to exist at this time, making this a Sherlock Holmes novel with a different standpoint, a modern social conscience.

They find Ross outside, visibly frightened by their appearance, who tells them nobody has entered or left the hotel and then leaves hurriedly with Wiggins. Well done Horowitz, you've done an excellent job, I'm sure Conan Doyle would be proud and thrilled with how you have taken his character and 'run with it'. He also alludes to events from A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, " The Adventure of the Red-Headed League", " The Adventure of the Devil's Foot", " The Adventure of the Speckled Band", " The Adventure of the Final Problem", The Hound of the Baskervilles, " The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, and the untold story of the " Giant Rat of Sumatra". He is afraid for his life, he tells Holmes, because a man wearing a flat cap has started standing outside his home, following him on evenings out; this man is, he believes, the sole surviving member of the Boston gang who has come to London to exact revenge on Carstairs for his involvement in the demise of his gang. Miss Carstairs then takes seriously ill, lying at death’s door, while Holmes and Watson are distracted by the torture and murder of a boy around whose wrist a clean length of white silk ribbon is left as a message.

Anthony Horowitz is not, of course, the first to add to the Holmesian canon – the 56 short cases and four novels first collected together and published as The Complete Sherlock Holmes in 1930. As someone who has read more than his fair share of second-rate Holmes spin offs, I can definitely recommend this one, Stu. Young boys of a different generation (namely my own, and it is here that I start to show my age) know him better for an altogether different series of books: those featuring the Diamond Brothers, beginning with his 1986 novel, The Falcon’s Malteser. To them I bequeath one last portrait of Mr Sherlock Holmes, and a perspective that has not been seen before.

He says that the story has not been told before because it is ‘too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print. Holmes did not take ill after his food was poisoned at dinner time nor at breakfast but then ‘took ill’ after being poisoned at 11 am during morning tea.With The House of Silk, Horowitz makes his first (and hopefully not his last) foray into the world of probably the most iconic detective of them all: Sherlock Holmes.