I probably shouldn’t have read this because I haven’t read The House of Silk, but I heard this was not a direct sequel and Moriarty was on sale so… I bought it and have absolutely no regrets.

Moriarty takes place straight after Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem, with both Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty presumed dead. A young man from the Pinkerton calling himself Frederick Chase arrives in Europe – he has heard rumours of that Devereux, the great criminal of America, has come to fill the vacuum left by Moriarty. After all, nature so abhors a vacuum.

When Chase runes into Inspector Jones of the Scotland Yard, the two of them team up to discover the true identity of Devereux and to prevent Europe from falling into the hands of this new criminal mastermind.

First thoughts: Wow, what an adventure!

I really shouldn’t spoil the book for you so all I can say is that I feel like I should have been able to predict the twist, given that I have seen it before, but I was completely unable to do so. I was feeling a little bored in the first chapter as Chase tries to give lots of background information, probably for people who don’t know what happens in The Final Problem, but the book quickly picked up steam and I really enjoyed seeing Jones and Chase work together as they try to uncover the identity of Devereux so that they can finally arrest him.

As for characters, my favourite was definitely Inspector Jones. He comes off as a very smart detective and he makes some really good deductions, but what I really appreciated was that unlike Holmes, he did have his weaknesses. These weaknesses were also very relevant to the plot, and I really liked how his strengths and weaknesses ended up being two sides of the same coin.

Overall, this was a great adventure that proved to be a lot of fun. It’s addictive and I basically finished it in an afternoon because I couldn’t put it down. I’m actually really curious about The House of Silk now and will definitely be reading that sometime!