Holmes Coming

Screenwriter Johnson (The Bionic Woman) updates the plot and premise he first employed in his 1993 TV film, 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns, with disappointing results. San Francisco pediatrician Amy Winslow is visiting a former patient, Mrs. Hudson, when a power outage affects a secret chamber in Mrs. Hudson’s basement, triggering the defrosting of a man who claims to be Sherlock Holmes, who froze himself in 1899 with the intent of returning to the world in 2025. Winslow’s skepticism at this fantastic account is gradually surmounted, and she joins him in probing some vicious murders involving a tiger that may be the work of a Moriarty descendant. The book’s conceit wasn’t even original in 1993, as a 1987 TV movie, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, also involved the revival of a suspended-animation Holmes. Awkward prose (“The Woman’s beautiful visage flitted through his brain again, gazing deeply into his eyes with a puckish twinkle in her own violet ones”) doesn’t help. Those interested in the iconic detective functioning in the modern age will be better off with Benedict Cumberbatch in the Sherlock TV series. Agent: Renee Fountain, Gandolfo Helin & Fountain Literary Management. (Nov.)