The House of Smoke

Christer (The Stonehenge Legacy) does a solid job recreating the Victorian underworld in this Sherlock Holmes knockoff, but he falls short of the standard set by John Gardner’s Moriarty trilogy in terms of character and plot. On January 1, 1900, Simeon Lynch, the self-described “manservant of Death” and the go-to hit man for the Moriarty organized crime family, is in London’s Newgate Gaol. In 17 days he will die on the gallows after conviction, ironically, for a murder he did not commit. The narrative alternates between the countdown to his execution and his backstory, in which the violent orphan, whose mother died giving birth to him, is enlisted by Professor Brogan Moriarty to become an enforcer and assassin. As the days go by, Lynch is eager to escape his fate, but he refuses to cooperate with Sherlock Holmes by ratting on his boss, even when offered a full pardon. That Christer never explains the survival of Brogan’s brother, James, at the Reichenbach Falls will strike readers familiar with the Holmes stories as odd. Agent: Luigi Bonomi, Luigi Bonomi Associates. (Nov.)