There are at bottom two sorts of Sherlock Holmes short story, and they appeal to different sorts of reader.

The first is born of the attempt to create what Sir Arthur's son Adrian Conan Doyle called "stories of the old vintage." Of these, I personally think the younger Doyle's work with John Dickson Carr (in _The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes_) is probably the best, and some of the other really good ones are collected in Richard Lancelyn Green's _The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. Arguably the finest current practitioner of the art is Denis O. Smith. At any rate, this book is not of that sort.

The second is more or less typified by Ian Charnock's recent publication (in _The Elementary Cases of Shelock Holmes_) of several stories alleged to spring from the pen of Stamford, who had known Holmes as a young man and in fact introduced him to Watson. These are cases of primarily historical interest, moderate entertainment value, and debatable authenticity, wherein both the historical interest and the entertainment value depend heavily on maintaining the appearance of authenticity. A single false note, even one which might have been forgivable in the other sort of work or even explained away as a literary embellishment, can bring the whole thing crashing down.

This book is of that sort. The stories themselves are better than those in Charnock's collection, but the reader looking solely for cries of "The game's afoot!" and adventures that recapture Doyle's magic will be disappointed.

The conceit of the present volume is that there were certain cases which it would have been imprudent to publish during the lifetimes of Holmes, Watson, and others, and yet which Watson believed it worthwhile to set down for posterity. There are seven stories in this collection, all of them historical cases in which (this volume asserts) Holmes played a part not recorded by history but here described by Watson in documents written up and sealed in his old age.

As a result, there are two difficulties for the reader seeking a transport of pure entertainment. First, the denouements are lacking; and second, the stories have few of the romantic "literary" flourishes Watson used in order to embellish and fictionalize his published accounts of Holmes's cases.

These features would be excusable and even welcome if the manuscript in question were authentic. Unfortunately, however, there seem to me to be grave doubts on that score.

One reason is the character and history of Professor James Moriarty, who appears in one tale which purports to be the true history of the adventures of the Final Problem, the Empty House, and Charles Augustus Milverton.

In the published version of "The Final Problem," Moriarty is presented as having made his international reputation at the age of twenty-one with a treatise on the binomial theorem. I have always taken this to be a product of Watson's fancy, as the binomial theorem was well known and understood long before Moriarty's time; it is hard to imagine what he could have had to say about it that would have garnered him such international fame.

Yet in the present volume, Moriarty is not only credited again with this treatise (when there is no reason to add any embellishments) but also given credit for being the first man in two centuries to prove Fermat's Last Theorem as well as the first in a century to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. This is historical and mathematical nonsense -- historical, because had Moriarty proven either of these famous conjectures he would have been the first, not the second, to do so; and mathematical, because once a theorem is proven, it is proven. (Sometimes mathematicians discover alternative proofs by shorter routes or different methods. But if this is what Holmes had meant, he would presumably have said so; Watson presents him here as possessing mathematical expertise and familiarity with its literature.)

Even more serious is that the end of this tale involves Watson in speculation that Holmes may have committed a dire act that, frankly, seems altogether out of character: the cold-blooded murder of a blackmailer threatening the reputation of the Crown. Granted, Holmes sometimes played fast and loose with the law in a good cause; granted, he sometimes went very far out on a limb in protection of queen/king and country. But this seems wrong.

(It might also be argued that I am illicitly judging the "real" Holmes using the "fictionalized" Holmes as a standard -- that, indeed, Watson remade Holmes to some extent as a literary character, and did so in part by suppressing this act. I am unmoved; I shall believe this only on much stronger evidence than is presented here. And the authenticity of this manuscript is, after all, the very point at issue.)

Moreover, I have another party on my side: Donald Thomas himself, in a short afterword, credits himself as the "author" in what would surely be a brazen claim were it not true.

I cannot agree with the readers who think this book is not worth rereading. There are some fine tales here in which, for example, Holmes is involved (as his admirers have always known he was) in the creation and development of forensic science. While not as gripping as the original Holmes tales, they are surely not as uninteresting as some readers have suggested.

But I am afraid I must withhold the judgment of authenticity. And under the scheme I set out in the first few paragraphs above, the "historical" tales are therefore not as interesting or as entertaining as they might have been. The manuscript was produced by a remarkable skilled hand, but in the end I think we must pronounce it to be a clever forgery.

The premise behind this book is simple: a number of criminal cases around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries are presented to include the involvement of Sherlock Holmes. The cases are "secret" because of one reason or another, including the involvement of high profile clients.

While the idea is a good one - and has been used before with the several versions of Sherlock Holmes investigating the activities of Jack the Ripper - the execution is sometimes frustrating. The cases under investigations are resolved in history, and so the "solutions" would have come about without Holmes' involvement (although Donald Thomas writes is such a way as you wouldn't think so).

I think that, for me, the main frustration is that Holmes is rarely there for the end, having done his investigations and left it to his clients and/or the authorities to finish the matter. While it is plainly established in he original Sherlock Holmes stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that Holmes often resolved cases and left the credit to the official police force, somehow these stories make this quite frustrating.

However, the way in which Holmes and the investigations themselves are written is certainly good fare for fans of the Great Detective, although you might want to have a case in which he plays an active role in the conclusion handy in case you feel the frustrations I did.

At first I thought this book would be intriguing, unfortunatly it was not a page turner, I almost had to force myself to finish the book. And the author had the gall to insinuate that Holmes' would murder to solve a case. Not really worth reading.

I bought this book with the hope of reading how top contemporary Protestant scholars address the issue of ecclesiology espoused by Rome and the Orthodox. It left me sadly disappointed. The chapter that addresses the four marks of the church defined in the nicene creed did not attempt to reconcile Protestant perceptions of those terms with the historical understanding of the council fathers. None dealt substantially with Eph 5:32. I was further saddened that one author criticized the piety of Catholics on the basis of his understanding rather than taking the time to just ask some of them why they were doing it. All guns trained against Catholicism while the Eastern Orthodox hold nearly identical views on ecclesiology. Perhaps someday a book with less rhetoric and polemic will attempt to address issues that build understanding rather than polarizing divisiveness.