Unquiet Spirits

Starred review from August 14, 2017
MacBird’s outstanding sequel to 2015’s Art in the Blood melds a twisty, multilayered plot with a plausible exploration of Sherlock Holmes’s life before Watson. The detective is unusually rude toward a prospective client, Isla McLaren, who seeks his help concerning a series of strange events at her husband’s ancestral home in the Scottish Highlands, Braedern Castle. A decade earlier, her mother-in-law died of exposure after being locked out of the castle. More recently, a servant fell to his death, and, a few days before Isla’s Baker Street consultation, a maid disappeared for two days before reappearing with all her hair shorn, reviving stories that Braedern Castle is haunted. Holmes refuses to help, but a request from brother Mycroft to look into an epidemic that’s devastating French vineyards, believed to be the product of British bioengineering, leads him back to the affairs of the McLarens, who are in the whiskey business. The risks that MacBird takes with her characterizations pay off and will make Sherlockians eager for more from her. Agent: Linda Langton, Langton’s International Agency.