His Last Bow

Watson narrates, loyal and clear-eyed, while Holmes reasons his way from small facts to large truths: a word misprinted, a splash of mud, a fixation on some mundane detail of the railway that everyone else has overlooked. The mysteries reach from a leathery fetish figure on a kitchen dresser to stolen submarine plans hidden in a dead clerk's pocket, and on to the black cliffs of Cornwall and a spy's undoing on the eve of war. Alongside come the familiar company: the ferret-quick Lestrade, and the portly and omniscient Mycroft, content to draw his modest salary and change nothing about himself.

The horror is kept close to the everyday. Holmes will feign his own deathbed to draw a confession from a poisoner, or let a guilty man walk free when the official law's proofs offend his private sense of justice. "I have never loved, Watson," he admits in one case, "but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done."

Here is a detective at the height of his powers and, in the closing pages, on the threshold of a changed world. Eight doors, each opening on a small puzzle, each waiting only for someone who likes to watch a mind work.