"Mycroft Holmes" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Why yes, I'm on a Sherlock Holmes kick.  Why do you ask?  :-D

I enjoyed Mycroft and Sherlock so very much that I got the first book in the series from the library as fast as I could.  And now that I'm done with it, I'll see if I can get the third one.

I didn't like this one quite as much as Mycroft and Sherlock, and that's mostly because Sherlock Holmes was barely in it.  Now, the Mycroft in these books is very engaging and sympathetic and interesting... but my heart belongs to his brother, and that's that.

Also, Mycroft in this book ends up morphing into kind of an Allan Quatermain-like person, engaging in fights and action sequences and all kinds of escapades in an exotic location.  Which was fun, but... I missed London.

So what happens is, Mycroft follows his fiancee Georgiana to Trinidad, bringing along his friend Cyrus Douglas, because that's where Douglas and Georgiana are both from, though she's white, the daughter of a wealthy planter, and he's black.  Georgiana begs Mycroft not to come because there's been creepy trouble back in Trinidad, with children dying and rumors of evil spirits and so on.  Which is precisely why Mycroft and Douglas want to go there.

A few poisonings, beatings, and violent fights later, and Mycroft begins trying his hand at detective work.  He and Douglas uncover an evil plot and the implications that Georgiana is not who she says she is.  By the time Mycroft returns to London, he's a very different person than the confident, smug, complacent young government worker he'd been when he left.  Also, he acquired muscles, which get mentioned once too often for my taste.

So anyway, this was darker than the second book in the series, and it lacked Sherlock in all but the very beginning and very end, and so... I liked it, but didn't love it.  But I still want to read the third book by Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse, 

I learned something neat and unexpected from both these books, though.  From the bio at the end, anyway ;-)  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar graduated with a degree in English and History from UCLA.  I graduated with minors in English and History!  Who knew I had a little bit of something in common with a famous basketball player who is 19 inches taller than I am?  According to his bio, he's been a Sherlock Holmes fan for many years (me too!) and has written/co-written like nine or ten other books besides these Mycroft books.  Who knew?  I didn't!

(From my Instagram)

Particularly Good Bits:

Holmes resembled their mother, with her strange grey eyes and spun gold hair, whereas Sherlock took after their father, all dark lines and angles, as if he were a Gothic building that, while handsome enough, had a few joints out of alignment (p. 75).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for violence and some mild cussing.  No smut.