The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – The Counterfeit Detective

A sinister game is afoot in New York City, and only Sherlock Holmes can stop it. The real Sherlock Holmes, that is. An impostor is making waves in America, solving crimes and trading on Holmes’s good name, and Holmes and Watson travel across the ocean to get to the bottom of the impostor’s plans. But when the faux Holmes’s landlady turns up dead, it quickly becomes a race against time to find the faker before more people suffer the same fate.

The Counterfeit Detective is a killer hook for a Holmes story, and the book gets off to a strong start with a mystery aboard ship as Holmes and Watson head to America. Unfortunately, the story slows down considerably afterward as Holmes and Watson swan about NYC aimlessly. The fish-out-of-water touches in the dangerous Five Points area of New York did add some color to the story, but not enough to distract from the pointless wheel-spinning in much of the novel.

Couple that with Holmes’s brusque tone with Watson — ruder than necessary, I’d say — and the all-too-neat wrap-up of the ending, and this felt more like a lesser episode of Steven Moffat’s Sherlock than a true Holmes adventure.