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"Some folks get religion. Gustav got Sherlock Holmes." Gustav is an cowboy living in Montana circa 1892, and he's so inspired by hearing The Red-Headed League that he starts collecting all of the Holmes stories he can. (As he is illiterate, the stories are read by his brother, our narrator.) And when their luck is down and odd things start happening at the ranch with the bad reputation, Gustav can't resist the urge to do a little of what his brother calls "detectiving." There are plenty of mysteries to go around on Cantlemere, colloquially known as the Bar VR. Why are the notoriously unsociable ranch bosses suddenly hiring? Why are the new hands threatened if they go out of strictly defined boundaries? Why was the ranch's tenderfoot secretary riding out in a dangerous thunderstorm? Was it true that a notorious cannibal was loose somewhere on the property? With all this going on, plus two violent deaths and the sudden arrival of the ranch's absentee owners, Gustav gets plenty of chances to match his wits against his hero's reputation. There isn't just one mystery here; there are about half a dozen interlocking puzzles all tightly worked together, keeping both Gustav and the reader guessing. Don't let the title fool you -- this cozy is pure western and Sherlock never appears. This is all about the ranch, and Hockensmith does an excellent job of depicting the hard, dusty life of the cowboy. The narrator's voice is wonderfully colloquial and also terribly funny, prone to expressions like "When Old Red gets lost in thought, Lewis and Clark couldn't find him again" and "one of [the animal's] hind hooves stamped the ground so tight on the inseam of my trousers that I could hear my unborn children crying out in mortal terror." The Amlingmeyer brothers, familiar to readers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, are finally reaching a wider readership in Hockensmith's first novel. HOLMES ON THE RANGE is a winner right out of the gate, and I hope it is the first of many full-length adventures in detectiving.
Reviewed by Linnea Dodson, April 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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