Mycroft Holmes and the Adventure of the Desert Wind

By: Janina Woods

Narrated by: Stockton Harris

Sherlock Holmes is missing. Dr. Watson receives a cursed note, summoning him to the city of Milan. In his plight, he turns to the one person who can help him: Mycroft Holmes, secret agent and eternally concerned elder brother. Mycroft has to team up with Dr. Watson and fellow agent Victoria Trevor to follow Sherlock's trail and stand against the dark forces that threaten his life.

©2017 Janina Woods (P)2017 MX Publishing

A fast-paced classic adventure with modern twists

Mycroft Holmes and the Adventure of the Desert Wind starts out at a fast pace and never really slows down, all without feeling rushed. The main characters tumble from one tight situation to the next, with any downtime in between being acknowledged, but not drawn out, which I appreciated.

Mycroft, a smugly confident action hero in this book, is a bit of a bastard, but not irredeemably so, and the two other main characters - Dr. John Watson and Secret Agent Victoria Trevor - get their own chances to shine and demonstrate competence despite Mycroft's initial conviction that any company will only slow him down.

I must admit that apart from seeing a few film and TV adaptations, I am largely unfamiliar with the Sherlock Holmes stories.
This didn't impair my enjoyment of the story as far as I can tell, although I'm sure fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories will recognize a character more here and there.
At the same time, The Adventure of the Desert Wind deviates from the originals (as far as I'm aware) both in terms of Mycroft Holmes' character traits as well as in its treatment of supernatural powers.
Whether you consider this blasphemy or a welcome change of pace depends on your relationship to the original story, I suppose.

Very mild/vauge spoiler: Personally, I appreciated some of the changes, but was left a bit wanting in terms of receiving an "aaah" moment where strange occurrences suddenly start making sense.

Narration:
The narrator does a very good job at evoking a sense of stress during the action scenes, but it took me a moment to get used to his voice and style of speaking - I had a little bit of trouble understanding every word in the beginning.
He also doesn't distinguish very clearly between different speaking voices, making it sometimes difficult to determine the speaker or to guess whether something is said out loud or part of the main character's inner monologue.
I also must admit that I didn't particularly like the slightly cliched Italian accents for Italian characters.

In conclusion: Mycroft Holmes and the Adventure of the Desert Wind is a quick, enjoyable and entertaining read not without its flaws.

For transparency's sake: the book's author is a friend of mine.

Steampunk James Bond

I respect the right of an author to fill in the blanks in a character. But this author took the names of the characters we know, and created entirely different characters. I did not recognize Mycroft Holmes or Dr. Watson.

The doctor was an incompetent weakling, and Mycroft was an arrogant, obnoxious, and completely unlikable clone of James Bond. I never liked them, and if I hadn’t agreed to an honest review in exchange for a free copy, I would not have bothered to finish. I would have asked for an exchange, for a title I might enjoy.

And this audiobook was not helped by the narrator. He is guilty of phonetic assimilation (look it up). Basically he runs words together, often losing syllables along the way.

In addition, he quite frequently misread and mispronounced words. One in particular, which might be the author’s fault, was “nondescriptive”. There are two words, (not) descriptive and nondescript. But the third is just wrong.

I know I don’t have the knowledge or talent to be a cosmologist, so I don’t try. In a like vein, this narrator lacks the vocabulary and the talent to read audiobooks. Give it up, dude, for all our sakes.

So all in all, I think I’d give this one a miss.