THE WHOLE ART OF DETECTION BY LYNDSAY FAYE - BOOK REVIEW

Hello everyone!

I am back with another book review, The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye. Thank you so much to Mysterious Press for sending me a finished copy of this book for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own.

Before I really get into this review, I just want to preface it by saying that I've never read or watched any Sherlock books/movies/television shows. My knowledge is pretty much just based on the few pop culture references I've come to know. Because of this, I can't really vouch for the "authenticity" of the characters as compared to the original book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Basically, this book is set up in four parts and is filled with a collection of short stories written by Faye about Sherlock and Watson's crime solving. Each story was able to stand on its own fairly well, they didn't really need to be read in any order, they didn't really build on the previous.

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book. Each story more or less followed the basic plot: Watson writing about something, someone comes to them with a crime, Sherlock solves it in about 5 pages and everything is explained to the reader/Watson who may not have figured everything out yet. The formula was pretty much given through each story, and as the book went on, I was able, not to solve the mystery, but to figure out when Sherlock was close.

That being said, I felt like after a certain point, the book was a little repetitive. Not so much in the content of the stories, but it was the same formula for each case. I don't feel like I learned much about the world of Sherlock and Watson, but was a kind of passerby who was told the story knowing that it would be solved in the end.

I think that the concept of this book was really great, but I almost feel like there are too many stories and they don't do much to explore the personalities of Sherlock and Watson. As someone who has zero background information on these people, I thought this book would be a great way to learn more about them.

I would say that if you are an avid Sherlockian, you will enjoy this book. It has mystery, snappy commentary between Sherlock and Watson which I imagine to be accurate in other representations. But for someone with little background info, I lost interest early. I really loved the first couple of parts, but after a while, it went downhill for me.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but some of the stories dragged at the end.