A curious affair indeed, as this is a story that goes in a couple of directions I didn’t anticipate. We begin traditionally enough, with Watson describing Holmes in one of his drug-soaked longueurs between cases. But then one of Watson’s calls – to attend upon a visiting American who has been beaten up during the theft of a painting, presumed a Titian, he had brought to London for verification – turns into one of Holmes’s clients. And from there we take several twists and turns before a revelation at the end not of who was behind the theft of the painting (though that’s included) but of the dual investigation that was going on all this time.

You see, this isn’t primarily a Sherlock Holmes mystery but one starring the American detective Miss Butterworth, the creation of Anna Katherine Green. Something very alert readers (not me!) will have twigged to in the name of the hotel manager being Gryce, since Ebenezer Gryce was the main detective created by Green. (Inspector Whicher gets name-dropped too, but that’s just a throwaway.) Anyway, it’s Miss Butterworth who really solves the case and then has to explain it all to Holmes. This puts him out to the point where he is said to be furious at her condescension, but she tells him he shouldn’t sulk because nobody’s perfect. I have to say though in Holmes’s defence that he has no reason to feel one-upped because Miss Butterworth had been investigating the case for months before he got involved, and she had far more personal information about what was going on.

Sara Paretsky, the creator of V. I. Warshawski, is obviously making a feminist point here, but it’s not one that I found took anything away from the story, which was enjoyable all the way through and stands well enough on its own.

Holmes index