review of Mike Hogan's second Sherlock Holmes novel.

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June 1887. As the climax of her Golden Jubilee celebrations, Queen Victoria will join more than fifty foreign monarchs and heads of state, her peers of the realm and her ministers in a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey. Spymasters in the newly created Special (Irish) Branch of Scotland Yard inform the Prime Minister that blood-oath Irish Republican fanatics vow to wipe out the Queen and her family; Fenian assassins will throw bombs of terrible potency using the new explosive, dynamite. Sherlock Holmes and his companions Doctor Watson and young Winston Churchill are called in not only to prevent a dynamite outrage against the Queen, but to avert a catastrophic war that might bring down the Empire. As the plot unravels, they find it harder and harder to determine who they can trust even at the highest levels of the government. Who is spying on whom?

Holmes and Watson team up once more with the schoolboy, Winston Churchill in a dark tale of politics and political uprising and plotting. As with his previous outing, Mike Hogan's own plotting is second to none. the pace is leisurely at times and then grips hard when required. The book opens with a gorgeous scene between Holmes and Watson in which Watson is trying to do the 'household' accounts. he fails to bring home the importance of frugality to Holmes and that becomes a recurring theme of the tale. 'Take the underground', cries the good Doctor. The result: a cab! The dialogiue in this opening scene displays the warth of the characters to each other and Mr Hogan's unerring way with dialogue which is witty without ever being forced. This scene is closely followed by one involving Lord Salisbury which matches the opening scene in its splendid dialogue. The novel goes from strength to strength after that, plots and sub-plots fly by all deftly handled. Moriarty makes an entrance, still the Napoleon of crime that we know him to be, but with the saving grace of being an Englishman! This is the kind of pastiche that gives pastiches a good name. I am inclined to think it's the one of the best pastiches of the last twenty years.

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