Beth Cato's Reviews > Alt.Sherlock Holmes

This ambitious anthology re-stages Sherlock Holmes through the vantage point of three different authors. I absolutely adored the first two. Jamie Wyman sets her versions of Holmes and Watson in a 1930s traveling circus. The cast is vivid and the atmosphere of the period is utilized in a wonderful way. Gini Koch moves her great detective to Los Angeles, where she (yes, a gender twist) works to solve crimes in the sordid underworld of reality TV. The approach is fascinating, and I especially love how she rewrote Irene Adler. The last portion of the book lost me in a big way. While Sherlock has always had issues with drug use, immersing him and Watson in the drug culture of late 1960s New York City just didn't set right with me. The writing of the setting itself is fantastic, but the setting and turbulence of the time took over a bit too much, it seemed, as the stories lacked cohesive beginnings, middles, and ends, and became more of overviews of the events of the period through Watson's eyes.