Bookish Wednesday

I stopped by the library after work yesterday and picked up a few books. I was hoping to get Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens, but it was out on loan. Instead I picked up a few other highly anticipated reads. I got the new Maisie Dobbs, Among the Mad, Marianne Macdonald's Smokescreen and David Pirie's The Night Calls.

I've already started Smokescreen and I'll move on to Amond the Mad next. Macdonald has quickly become a favorite author of mine. Her Dido Hoare series is fantastic. I love reading about murder and intrigue anyway, but making the protagonist a rare bookseller makes this series a must.

I haven't read David Pirie before, but he's a must read for Sherlock Holmes pastiche. He writes a series subtitled: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, and chronicles Holmes's early career, beginning as a med student. I can't wait to get into this one sometime next week. I already collect Winspear and Macdonald and can envision beginning a Pirie collection before long.

Now reading:
Smokescreen by Marianne Macdonald

On deck:
Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear
The Night Calls by David Pirie

The 6 Messiahs

I started Mark Frost's The 6 Messiahs on Friday and I'm making my way through the book much too quickly to be honest with you. The 6 Messiahs is a sequel to Frost's The List of Seven and both follow Arthur Conan Doyle as he takes part in grand adventure mysteries with Jack Sparks, the archetype for Sherlock Holmes.

In The 6 Messiahs, Doyle is in America on a book tour, getting mobbed by the hungry American readers. Doyle has just killed off Holmes and the American reading public wants more Holmes stories. The reason Doyle killed off Holmes is because Sparks had supposedly met his fate the same way 10 years earlier. But in America, much to Doyle's astonishment, Sparks appears again. Sparks is searching for the sacred missing holy books that are being stolen from around the globe. And it's up to Sparks, Doyle and Doyle's brother, to save the texts before they are put to evil use.

Sparks is a great character, but Doyle is the real star in the Frost novels. In this book, Doyle is a more mature, stronger, self assured man than in the first book. And though he has developed a greater sense of deductive reasoning and a taste for adventure, his natural hesitations in tight situations play nicely against Sparks's absolute actions.

Frost does a nice job making this series (though he only wrote two books) a Sherlock Holmes story on crack, without going overboard. In fact, though I hate to make the correlations, Frosts books bare more of a resemblence to the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie, than to Doyle's stories. The books are grittier and more adventuresome, but Doyle (as Watson) keeps the reader interested and grounded, trying to reign in Sparks from time to time. Luckily for us, he's not always able to do so.

Now reading:
The 6 Messiahs by Mark Frost

On deck:
Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child