Yesterday I read Son of Holmes by John Lescroart. I was expecting a story with a heavy and heady Edwardian atmosphere, some explanation of where this son came from (i.e., mother?), and strong parallels or very sharp contrasts between father and son. I got none of this: instead the book offered an extremely anemic espionage plot set in the South of France at the beginning of World War One.  We are told it is the south of France but there is little in atmosphere or landscape to distinguish the setting from Kansas.  Auguste Lupa makes a few oblique references to his father, and even fewer to his mother.  He himself remains undeveloped as a character, and indeed all the characters in the book are one-dimensional, difficult to distinguish one from the other (other than the nervous, hen-pecked Pulis), and, like the plot, less than compelling.

The Prologue, set in 1980s Boston, is the best part of the whole book, introducing the concept of Holmes as a real person, not a fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle but instead a friend of Doyle who complied with his own myth-making as the detective of Baker Street.  The book would have been much more fun to read if the connections between fact and fiction had continued throughout the book with easy clues of similarity between father and son in terms of detection, tastes, deductions, and observations, but Conan Doyle is too good a writer to replicate easily and Lescroart’s book falls far short of the mark of a good detective story and is even worse as a tale of espionage.

For a great espionage thriller set in World War One, read Drink to Yesterdayby the writing duo Manning Coles.  Written by real-life spy Coles and his neighboring author Manning, this novel and the ones that followed, including A Toast to Tomorrow, offer realistic and wholly gripping journeys into the world of agents, double agents, assignations, assassinations, and sabotage.