The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Dibdin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The problem is sometimes preferable to the solution….
I’ve read Dust and Shadow and that novel honestly did not live up to expectations. So why did I pick up another Holmes mystery involving Jack the Ripper? Well, first of all, I’m running out of Holmes pastiches and life is getting dull. 
Okay. So Holmes and Watson are once again in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, masquerading as the Napoleon of Crime. Holmes is wonderfully eccentric and Watson does a good job playing the sidekick-turned-detective (you’ll see what I mean by that after you read the book!). Jack the Ripper was wonderfully scary and his actions were the icing on the cake. And the scene at Reichenbach was the perfect denouement. There were a few things about this story that did not work, however.
First of all, and this is mostly a complaint because my mind tends to wander, the chapters were way too long. It made the author seem in a hurry to put the story down without distributing the information evenly. Second of all, Watson using cocaine. Really? I mean, come on, that’s ridiculous. I can’t disclose my final complaint without giving away a major spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that.
Not a bad read, but it got too carried away in trying to be original and failed to stay satisfyingly faithful to the source material.
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