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The Case of the Reluctant Agent: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
About the Author Tracy Cooper-Posey's first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Chronicles of the Last Years, was awarded Best Pastiche by the Sherlock Holmes Soceity and met with widespread praise. Also a national award-winning romance novelist, Cooper-Posey has published e-book bestsellers and teaches over the internet. Born and raised in Australia, she now lives in Edmonton. Book Description It's 1917 and the Great War has been raging for three long years. Mycroft Holmes grows suspicious of one of the agents reporting back to him from the heart of the Ottoman Empire and asks his brother Sherlock to investigate. Sherlock Holmes proves to be, for once, stubbornly reluctant to fulfill Mycroft's request. When Mycroft is shot and left for dead, Sherlock is forced to go to Constantipole to uncover the man behind the deed. Unfortunately before he was assaulted Mycroft failed to communicate which one of his agents is the turncoat. Reader Reviews 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful: Satisfactory!, June 22, 2002 Reviewer: Rory Coker from Austin, TX USA I happened to purchase this novel and the author's previous Holmes effort, CHRONICLES OF THE MISSING YEARS, simultaneously. That was fortunate, because if I had purchased and read COTMY first, I would never have purchased another novel by this author, and so would have missed out on this one. In short, this pastiche has everything that the first novel lacked: plot, vivid characters and characterizations, continual new developments and unexpected incidents. There's a good, scenery-chewing villain, Von Stein, and plenty of frantic action, as various secret agents practice the double- and triple-cross. As in any novel which mixes Holmes into WWI, there's not a lot of opportunity for Holmes to be Holmes--- instead, he's a rather elderly, but still spry action hero. The novel's only liability is the return of a preposterous character from CHRONICLES, among whose many absurdly exaggerated abilities is that of being in two widely-separated locations at what is apparently the same instant, both timewise and plotwise. It is also a bit disappointing not to have Watson around, and further to be left at novel's end with no clear indication as to the current status of Mycroft Holmes. If you don't mind some bending of the willow, you'll probably enjoy this adventure of Holmes in the middle East during the height of WWI.
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