Mycroft and Sherlock

Mycroft and Sherlock

The new novel by NBA All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, starring brothers Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes. It is 1872, and a series of gruesome murders is the talk of London. Mycroft Holmes--now twenty-six and a force to be reckoned with at the War Office--has no interest in the killings; however, his brother Sherlock has developed a distasteful fascination for the macabre to the detriment of his studies, much to Mycroft's frustration. When a ship carrying cargo belonging to Mycroft's best friend Cyrus Douglas runs aground, Mycroft persuades Sherlock to serve as a tutor at the orphanage that Douglas runs as a charity, so that Douglas might travel to see what can be salvaged. Sherlock finds himself at home among the street urchins, and when a boy dies of a suspected drug overdose, he decides to investigate, following a trail of strange subterranean symbols to the squalid opium dens of the London docks. Meanwhile a meeting with a beautiful Chinese woman leads Mycroft to the very same mystery, one that forces him to examine the underbelly of the opium trade that is enriching his beloved Britain's coffers. As the stakes rise, the brothers find that they need one another's assistance and counsel. But a lifetime of keeping secrets from each other may have catastrophic consequences...
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Reviews

Photo of Sarah Sammis
Sarah Sammis@pussreboots
3 stars
Apr 4, 2024

** spoiler alert ** Like so many of the Sherlock Holmes pastiches, this second volume draws on familiar details from the canon. This one, though, seems to have drawn not from the original source, so much as from a popular modern reinterpretation, namely Sherlock. In particular, "The Blind Banker" (series 1, episode 2). But this homage to an homage is recontextualized against the Opium War. The opium clues are so blatant that it was hard for me to fathom how not one, not even two, but three described attentive geniuses could fail to piece together things. Granted, I have years of reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries (and other mysteries) as well as twenty-twenty hindsight on history but still, these three are supposed to be the cream of the sleuthing crop. http://pussreboots.com/blog/2022/comm...

Photo of Judy Hudgins
Judy Hudgins@knottyneedle
4 stars
Oct 18, 2021

After all the attention on Sherlock Holmes over the years, it is interesting to see adventures from Mycroft's point of view.

Photo of Ryan B Harvey
Ryan B Harvey@codeanddata
4 stars
Jan 8, 2022