The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Paris, 1890. When Sherlock Holmes finds himself chasing an art dealer through the streets of Paris, he’s certain he’s smoked out one of the principals of a cunning forgery ring responsible for the theft of some of the Louvre’s greatest masterpieces. But for once, Holmes is dead wrong.
He doesn’t know that the dealer, Theo Van Gogh, is rushing to the side of his brother, who lies dying of a gunshot wound in Auvers. He doesn’t know that the dealer’s brother is a penniless misfit artist named Vincent, known to few and mourned by even fewer.
Officialdom pronounces the death a suicide, but a few minutes at the scene convinces Holmes it was murder. And he’s bulldog-determined to discover why a penniless painter who harmed no one had to be killed–and who killed him. Who could profit from Vincent’s death? How is the murder entwined with his own forgery investigation?
Holmes must retrace the last months of Vincent’s life, testing his mettle against men like the brutal Paul Gauguin and the secretive Toulouse-Lautrec, all the while searching for the girl Olympia, whom Vincent named with his dying breath. She can provide the truth, but can anyone provide the proof? From the madhouse of St. Remy to the rooftops of Paris, Holmes hunts a killer—while the killer hunts him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The execution doesn't match the concept of Miller's middling second Sherlock Holmes pastiche (after 2021's The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle), in which the sleuth investigates the 1890 death of Vincent van Gogh. In the prologue set years later, Dr. Watson refers to a rift, unhealed at the time of Holmes's recent death, "brought on by his perverse fascination with spiritualism," but there's not even a hint at how the ultra-rational detective came to believe that one can communicate with the dead. Watson goes on to present the van Gogh case, with which he wasn't involved. The narrator instead is another doctor, who, along with Holmes, is in France to investigate a consortium's fears that the Parisian art world is "threatened by a criminal conspiracy," which has replaced 12 priceless works with forgeries at the Louvre. Holmes believes that van Gogh's death from a gunshot was not suicide and is connected to the forgery plot. While others, such as Sam Siciliano, have succeeded in presenting a plausible Holmes from a non-Watsonian perspective, Miller fails to do so. Nothing in this outing will make Sherlockians eager for a sequel.
