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The thing about series novels—especially when they're plot driven rather than character driven—is that they can fizzle out, quickly becoming predictable and formulaic. That may be one reason Michael Robertson gives his latest installment in the Baker Street Mystery series an unexpected angle right from the beginning.
The novel opens in December 1893 where we see a man who claims to be Moriarty tortured and killed. About 50 pages in, the setting switches to wartime London in 1944 before finally bringing us to present times (1998). Even then, though, our usual protagonists don't show up immediately except in a glancing reference to Laura Rankin. But Laura, Reggie Heath, and, eventually, Nigel Heath, do finally make their appearances, finding themselves—as usual—in life-threatening situations that stem from their association with letters written to Sherlock Holmes. This time, though, it isn't Nigel's interference that causes the trouble. Instead, the trouble stems from connections that reach back to that beginning in 1893. Through some convoluted twists and turns, those connections touch the present-day characters and spoil Laura's and Reggie's engagement-announcement trip.
Robertson sets up a complicated, interesting mystery, and the 1893 and 1944 sections of the novel are particularly well done, as are the chapters that introduce the present-day murdered man and possible murderer. But once Laura and the Heaths appear on the scene, the present-day sections spend a lot of time spinning wheels without really going much of anywhere. We have random, mysterious encounters with threatening characters, incredibly easy-to-see-through villainous plots to recover a letter (the reader can see through the plots, though Reggie, smart as he is, never seems to catch on), and a somewhat gratuitous murder as well as the usual array of conveniently timed coincidences and deaths that all add up to a neatly tied-up ending.
Overall, Robertson manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of series novels—but only just. MORIARTY RETURNS A LETTER is a fun read because of the plot twists set up at the beginning, but the puzzles are a bit too easy to figure out, and, for seasoned readers of the series, the situations are becoming a bit too predictable to maintain edge-of-your-seat suspense, even with the giant dose of suspension of disbelief required by the earlier novels. For readers who have just discovered the series, this book is a fine introduction (no need to know the characters beforehand), but for those who have read Robertson's previous Baker Street Mysteries, this may mark the beginning of an end to the books' ability to hold the reader's interest and thrill to a good tale.
§ Meredith Frazier, a writer with a background in English literature, lives in Dallas, Texas
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier, April 2014
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