Mycroft Holmes

Series: Mycroft Holmes and Sherlock, Book 1

By: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Anna Waterhouse / Narrated By: Damian Lynch

Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins

Amusing, interesting, enough action with a heavy emphasis on witty dialogue? GREAT characters who are well-developed? Dude, what’s NOT to LOVE?!

I admit: I’m not very into the Sherlock Holmes Canon; I had to hit Wikipedia to learn about Mycroft Holmes. And what I found there? Well well well! ‘Twould appear that authors Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse preeeetty much stuck to Mycroft as the character is spoken of in the Sherlock Holmes’s stories.

As the story opens, Mycroft Holmes is hopping over a fence to use his powers of observation (Which even Sherlock muses are greater than his own) to help Cambridge beat Oxford in a rowing match. He observes callouses, he calculates fluids ingested with sweat output and weight loss, and he rearranges the seating for the crew. And huzzah! NOBODY bet on Cambridge as they’d been beaten well and truly nine years straight, so he and his buddy Cyrus Douglas, a free Black man who hails from Trinidad, are all tickled to death with themselves with their winnings. This, unfortunately, draws the ire of a disgruntled lot of boorish (And drunk!) losers who chase the pair.

This escapade is ended in a MOST satisfactory manner, where Mycroft scrolls through REAMS of memories until he finds just the right information at just the right time. Again, Huzzah! And there’s enough clever repartee between Holmes and Douglas that right away one is liking Douglas as a wildly intelligent man who makes no bones in calling Holmes out. Surely, this duo will get into some worthy scrapes indeed!

Soon we’re into the main plot where Mycroft’s most beloved fiancée has dashed off to Trinidad upon learning information that has come to Douglas’s attention. In his home country, Douglas has heard all sorts of horrible information of children being found dead, drawn away by evil spirits, their bodies sucked bloodless by even more wretched entities. As Georgiana hails from a grand plantation on Trinidad, she’s off like a shot, leaving Mycroft bewildered, wild with frustration and, as Douglas was leaning heavily towards setting off to his homeland himself, Mycroft snags him up in a plan to join Georgiana (Tho’ she speCIFically told Mycroft NOT to!) onboard her ship.

ImMEDiately, things go quite awry with all sorts of violence, nefarious plots, mayhem once onboard. And things get only more dire when Mycroft and Douglas slooooowly begin unraveling a plot of indentured servitude? Nay, kidnappings and SLAVERY. Cuz the slave trade did NOT end with the Civil War; there are still corporate giants who would have their livelihoods being maintained by slave labor.

There are rabbit holes aplenty, red herrings, and certainly there are a MULtitude of ill-fated capers involving the duo and the ragtag coalition of heroes they draw to them. There are bouts of violence, and very sad deaths as Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse spare nothing and no one in service of a story that winds up being emotionally satisfying… as well as being entertaining as all get-out. Mycroft, who’s referred to as Holmes (Thus upsetting true Sherlock Fans due to SHERLOCK being perpetually referred to as Holmes in those stories) throughout, grows from an energetic and wildly untried erstwhile college boy into one of a more serious nature as his mythical story for himself ever more clearly shows itself to be false.

Damian Lynch, who turned in a TRULY bland performance in his narration of the nonfiction work, Don’t Believe a Word, is magnificent here. When Douglas goes from his mild accent that’s mixed with British (Well done!) to full-on Island? Brilliant! Again, sooo many accents in all the books I listened to this week, that here once more I shall applaud yet another narrator for managing all of them even as action sweeps the listener up in the swift pacing and the rapid-fire back and forth of witty character dialogue. Then too, here with Mycroft Holmes, Lynch manages to convey the sloooow evolution between young dilettante dabbling innocently in action, all the way to serious man, maybe not keen on action, but certainly capable of getting down and dirty (AND climbing trees!), one who knows grief, can handle suffering.

Soooo looking forward to the next in the series, and I am soooo thrilled that I picked ALL of them up via sales from various audiobook websites.

Onward, tallyho!!!