MORIARTY

Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz

Sherlock Holmes is dead.

Days after Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty fall to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls, Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase arrives in Europe from New York. The death of Moriarty has created a poisonous vacuum which has been swiftly filled by a fiendish new criminal mastermind who has risen to take his place.

Ably assisted by Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, a devoted student of Holmes’s methods of investigation and deduction, Frederick Chase must forge a path through the darkest corners of the capital to shine light on this shadowy figure, a man much feared but seldom seen, a man determined to engulf London in a tide of murder and menace.

THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW

A sequel to House of Silk the first Sherlock Holmes novel approved by his estate and also written by Horowitz, this is a very worthy successor to the whole Holmes canon. I honestly enjoyed every aspect of the novel from the style to the characters and from the setting to the plot. 

Jones and Chase are so good together that even though I thought I’d feel cheated by the absence of Holmes and Watson I was pleasantly surprised to discover I wasn’t in any way. A fast paced thriller with a large enough cast of characters to keep you on your toes when trying to figure out the many twists and turns. It never talks down to the reader or sinks into manufacturing unnecessary content to justify the scattering of clues throughout the book.

The final twist is one of the best I’ve ever seen and the execution manages to leave clues without signposting the ending so early it ruins the readers experience. I hope this is just another of a series of successors to the greatest detective of all time because intelligent novels like this can be hard to find.