The World's Greatest Detective gone Steampunk!

Greetings! I'd thought I'd share a favourite with you all- something for those who love a good mystery, starring Sherlock Holmes.

Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus, P.C Martin
(MX Publishing, ltd., United Kingdom, 2012)

In this retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Bruce-Partington Plans, the famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes is called in by his sister Mycroft when the plans for the Nautilus, the submarine of Captain Nemo (of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island) are stolen. As anyone who has studied the entire Conan-Doyle corpus, you can immediately pick out the changes in this incarnation of Holmes- he rides a motorcycle, and a weapons-trained sister takes the place of his canonical, less inclined to physical action elder brother Mycroft, but of course Watson is a constant, telling the story from his perspective as always, albeit with a bionic arm equipped with weapons.

Perhaps this is where the book does fall a little short. There are parts where the author has tried a little too hard to inject the Steampunk genre into the story itself, and often switches into chase scenes and shootouts, and so perhaps those so devoted to the canon might find it a bit distasteful. It honestly depends on personal opinion- I find it more an accquired taste, really- and it wasn't well received by most readers, with reviews from Amazon calling it 'rushed' and one even saying that the author had only done enough to not be seen as a plagiarist since she copied most of the original short story. The illustrations take up most of the e-book, so I would recommend getting the digital version on a tablet. I'm mostly indifferent, it's a good read for a rainy day. I'll let you all decide.

Must be off now, I'll leave you with this video demo of the interactive app that was released for the book. The Alchemist's Guild is meeting again soon and I'm being expected there.

Regards, 

E.