Revenge from the Grave

January 31, 2022
Davies’s middling 10th novel-length pastiche (after 2019’s The Instrument of Death) plays a variation on an overused theme—Professor Moriarty’s return from the dead. After Holmes traps the professor’s number two, Col. Sebastian Moran, Moran manages to escape custody. A letter is left for Holmes, signed by Moriarty, announcing his return and the start of a revenge campaign. Holmes is certain that someone else is posing as the Napoleon of crime and reconstituting his criminal organization, possibly a Frenchwoman who ran a gang in Paris under the nom de plume Madame Defarge. His efforts to stay alive as he seeks to identify and thwart his new adversary occupy the bulk of the book, leaving the sleuth little room to employ his deductive reasoning powers as the action builds to an anticlimactic reveal. Sections not narrated by Watson eliminate some suspense, and the prose jars in places (at one point Holmes refers to his relationship with his brother, Mycroft, as good, because “blood is a great coagulant”). Readers interested in a better take on this idea should seek out John Gardner’s Moriarty series.