London. A snowy December, 1888.
Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend – until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris. Mademoiselle La Victoire, a beautiful French cabaret star writes that her illegitimate son by an English Lord has disappeared, and she has been attacked in the streets of Montmartre.
Racing to Paris with Watson at his side, Holmes discovers the missing child is only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem. The most valuable statue since the Winged Victory has been violently stolen in Marseilles, and several children from a silk mill in Lancashire have been found murdered. The clues in all three cases point to a single, untouchable man.
Will Holmes recover in time to find the missing boy and stop a rising tide of murders? To do so he must stay one step ahead of a dangerous French rival and the threatening interference of his own brother, Mycroft.
This latest adventure, in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sends the iconic duo from London to Paris and the icy wilds of Lancashire in a case which tests Watson's friendship and the fragility and gifts of Sherlock Holmes' own artistic nature to the limits.

My Review:

“Art in the blood” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? It also might sound just a bit familiar – as well as in keeping with this first book in the author’s Sherlock Holmes Adventure series. The quote is from Holmes himself in the original canon, specifically The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter.

In that story, Holmes attributes both his own and his brother Mycroft’s skill in and facility with the ‘Art of Detection’ to the “art in the blood” inherited from their grandmother, “who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist.”

(There were several members of the Vernet family who lived at approximately the right time and were artists, Claude Joseph Vernet, Carle Vernet and Horace Vernet. Which Vernet Holmes referred to is one of the MANY things about his origins that can be speculated about but is never definitely stated.)

As this story begins, the art in Sherlock Holmes’ blood, combined with an utter dearth of interesting cases and possibly owing more than a bit to the absence of his friend and chronicler, Dr. John Watson, has dropped the ‘Great Detective’ into a slough of despond, causing Holmes to resort to entirely too many applications of his ‘seven-per-cent solution’ of cocaine.

Holmes is a bigger mess than even his usual depths and the generally unflappable Mrs. Hudson is at her wits’ end. She can’t help Holmes but she knows just who can.

So she calls Watson, in both of his capacities – as Holmes’ friend AND most definitely as his physician, because she can’t tell which her lodger needs more.

As it turns out – both. But what Holmes needs above all – is a case that will test him to his utmost. A case that is presented to him, literally on a silver salver, from several directions at the same time.

Brother Mycroft blackmails him into investigating a violent art theft at the Louvre. A beautiful French chanteuse begs him to discover the location of her missing child. Children are being kidnapped and murdered from a silk mill in Lancashire.

One seemingly untouchable aristocrat is at the center of all three cases. The silk mill is his. The chanteuse’s child is also his. And the statue at the center of the art theft is on its way to him in Lancashire even as Holmes and Watson dash from London to Paris and back in an attempt to put all the pieces together before it is once again too late for another poor child.

Or for themselves.

Escape Rating B+: This book has had a place deep in the virtually towering TBR pile for almost a decade – which is kind of embarrassing. I usually say that I read about 50% of the books I get – EVENTUALLY. This is apparently what that eventually looks like. To be fair, I liked this one more than enough to BUY the rest of the series that’s out so far and pick up the eARC for the forthcoming entry, The Serpent Under.

I spelunked into that TBR pile because I was looking for another comfort read after Old Scores. In fact, I was looking for something ‘like’ Barker & Llewelyn that wasn’t actually them. Which is what led me around to this series, as Barker & Llewelyn may not be Holmes but it is in dialogue with the ‘Great Detective’ so I decided to approach that dialogue from a different angle.

Cyrus Barker & Thomas Llewelyn are variations on Sherlock Holmes & John Watson in the sense that they are set in the same time period and feature a detective duo where one is clearly the genius and the other a follower, BUT, they also change the formula and speak to our time even more than their own by exploring and empathizing with the people of London – and elsewhere – who were outsiders in the city they called home. Barker is Scots, Llewelyn is Welsh, Barker’s business partner is Chinese, Llewelyn’s fiance is Jewish, as is his best friend – and the list, as well as the cases that are involved – goes on and on and into neighborhoods that the original Holmes would have looked down upon and only considered while stereotyping the people within.

The Holmes & Watson of this set of adventures, reads as though it is not so much the child of the original as the grandchild of the original canon, filtered through an intermediate generation of TV interpretations, notably Jeremy Brett’s Victorian-era Holmes, the more modern Sherlock and Elementary – with a touch of Robert Downey Jr.’s manic movie Holmes as well.

(I think I spy just a bit of Laurie R. King’s Holmes from her Holmes & Russell series too, but your reading mileage may vary.)

So, very much on the one hand, the Holmes of Art in the Blood is a bit more, not so much emotional as demonstrative. He’s more of a romantic hero in the small ‘r’ sense of romance, more self-sacrificing, more likely to put himself in harm’s way – and more likely to get there on his own – more likely to have an obvious soft spot for small children in need of rescue.

It’s not that the original Holmes doesn’t have most of those characteristics, more than he hides them better.

The case in Art in the Blood, while every bit as convoluted – and then some – as some of the original stories, displays a lot more confusion on Holmes’ part and frankly a lot more competence on Watson’s – a competency that calls back to Edward Hardwicke’s Doctor Watson, the partner of Jeremy Brett’s Holmes.

In other words, I had as much fun figuring out which ways this resembled other interpretations of these characters that I have seen or read as I did following along with the multiple mysteries in this story as they wound their multitude of ways into one dastardly whole. A whole that was quite a bit deeper and darker than one expects from a Sherlock Holmes story – but every bit as chilling, thrilling AND deadly.

I had fun reading Art in the Blood, and it certainly distracted me at a time when that’s exactly what I was looking for. Which means that I picked up the whole rest of the series so I’ll be back with Unquiet Spirits the next time I need a mysteriously comforting read.