|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Audiobook available from www.wfhowes.co.uk and www.ukaudiobooks.co.uk It's 1924 and the ailing Mycroft Holmes asks his bother Sherlock to try to locate Kimball O'Hara in India, the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling's KIM. He seems to have been part of the Great Game -- spying in the treacherous border regions of India, but no-one has heard from him for three years and other agents in the area have been dying. Sherlock sets off at breakneck speed to find him, with his much younger wife Mary Russell at his side. And so we embark with them on a liner to India, and follow their travels by road through the countryside of India, disguised as magicians and with a local boy accompanying them to take care of the horses. Mary and Sherlock have naturally learned the local lingo fluently on the way out. They are headed to the border state run by a Western-educated ruler, known to his friends as Jimmy, whose reputation strikes Sherlock as rather fishy. Whilst Sherlock hangs around the local town astounding the locals with his magic, Mary wangles an invitation to stay at the palace and tries to identify where Kim might be held. Jimmy is certainly an eccentric, he has his own zoo, staffed by little people, and delights in taking Mary on a dangerous pig-sticking outing, a game very popular at the time, where wild boar are hunted on horseback with spears. He also has a very interesting collection of palace guests, none of whom seem very happy to be there. Regrettably I did not enjoy THE GAME. I'm not a Sherlockian, but had heard praise for this series, and had very much enjoyed A GRAVE TALENT, in the author's modern day Kate Martinelli series. I was hopeful that I would find an engaging historical with a good puzzle and an interesting Indian backdrop, and that I would find the heroine entertaining. That I did not was, I suspect, partly due to the narration of the tale by Jenny Sterlin. Whilst I felt her rendition in the second half of the book was more enjoyable, in the first half she sounded very sour, snooty and middle aged, and frankly if she'd been physically present in my car instead of on tape I might have dumped her out at the first set of traffic lights! I don't pretend to know much about the character of Mary Russell, but it was not what I was expecting and it irritated me enormously. This was not the book's only problem for me, though, given my expectations. It wasn't really a mystery at all, just a long and at times dangerously soporific travelogue to be listening to whilst behind the wheel, with a little snooping around at its conclusion -- by which time I was well past caring. Neither did I learn anything new about India, but, on the other hand. I now know a great deal more about pig-sticking that I ever imagined I would. Perhaps series fans will enjoy it more that I did.
Reviewed by Bridget Bolton, January 2005
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
