I will start the review by saying I really disliked this book. There were many times when I wanted to give up on it but I persevered, expecting a twist at the end that would explain why it was written the way it was. And there was but the explanation was farcical and left me with an even greater distaste. The rest of this review will discuss the book and my feelings more without giving away any major spoilers.

The best-selling author Anthony Horowitz was commissioned by the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle to write more Sherlock Holmes novels. The first one was called The House of Silk and I gave it a very good review. This was the second one and is called Moriarty and to be quite frank, I was not looking forward to it despite my enjoyment of the first one.

This is because I always found the character of Professor Moriarty to be intensely annoying. The whole idea of this brilliant criminal mastermind, working in the shadows, manipulating his vast network of subordinates to do his bidding and avoiding capture, is one that I find implausible and irritating. Furthermore, we are told that few know what he looks like or where he lives, even though he is also a brilliant mathematician highly regarded for his work and who once had a prestigious professorship at a reputed university.

He appears just twice in the Holmes canon and is mentioned in passing a few more times as a malign hidden influence in some cases. Conan Doyle created the character when he decided to kill off Holmes and he seemed to feel the need to have someone of equal stature in terms of brilliance to do the deed. So Moriarty was born, just so that he and Holmes could have their fateful encounter in Reichenbach Falls which results in both appearing to fall into the watery abyss and die. That story was, in my opinion, one of the worst stories in the Holmes canon, written with just one purpose in mind, to end the series. But under pressure from his reading public, Conan Doyle arranged for Holmes to miraculously survive and reappear three years later, having spent the intervening time pretending to be dead, and that resurrection story was also pretty bad.

But the evil genius criminal mastermind seems to capture the public’s attention and is a very popular trope. In subsequent dramatizations in films and TV, Moriarty figures prominently. In the series Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, Moriarty is a major character throughout the series, growing increasingly cartoonish and diabolical as it went on.

So I was not expecting too much of this book but even with my low expectations, I found the book to be absolutely terrible. But it was not for the above reasons. It was mainly because when a book is advertised as a Sherlock Holmes story, you expect Holmes to be the main character and Dr. John Watson to be the narrator. But in this book, neither one of them appear at all. 221B Baker Street and Holmes’s long-suffering housekeeper Mrs. Hudson are also conspicuously absent. In short, all the features that make a Sherlock Holmes story are missing. The narrator is an investigator with the American Pinkerton Agency who is in pursuit of an American criminal mastermind who has come to England. He works with a Scotland Yard detective Athelney Jones who had worked before with Holmes on a case. Jones, plus cameo appearances by Inspectors Lestrade and Gregson, are the only connections to the Holmes stories.

The book forsakes the measured voice of Watson and becomes more of a noir novel in the style of Raymond Chandler, with more gruesome violence. There is nothing particularly wrong with that if you want to read a Chandler novel. But it is not a Sherlock Holmes novel and I felt cheated. What is worse is that the plot is preposterous and the surprise ending is so ridiculous as to make this reader feel that he has been taken for a ride. Horowitz seems to have got carried away and is too clever by half. If not for the Holmes aura, this book would have died in obscurity, and it would have been well-deserved.

I will not reveal anything more about the book so as to not spoil it for those who still wish to read it after this review. But I definitely cannot recommend it. It does not deserve to be in the Sherlock Holmes canon.