The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
London is in flux. The clop of the hansom cab has given way to the madness of the motorcar. And Sherlock Holmes, safe in the bee-loud glades of the Sussex downs, is lured back to London when a problem is posed to him by Dr. Watson and Watson’s friend, Col. Higgins. Is the transformation of Eliza Doolittle from girl of the streets to duchess more than it seems? Is it really the work of Henry Higgins’s phonetics lessons or has another girl been substituted for her, and why? Has the original girl been murdered? Even Eliza’s father can’t say for sure.
Posing as a rich American gangster, Holmes infiltrates the Higgins household. He meets Freddy, a seemingly ubiquitous suitor, and the mysterious Baron Von Stettin, Bavarian attaché. He brushes up against a doctor whose potions can turn Eliza from a spitfire into a kitten. And he faces a deadly enemy who had been thought dead for twenty years. The world of Sherlock Holmes will never be the same.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The execution falls short of the appealing premise of Miller's ambitious debut, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that merges Conan Doyle's characters with ones from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. In 1912, after the detective's retirement, Dr. Watson is consulted by an old army friend, Col. Hugh Pickering, who's concerned about a Cockney flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle, who has been taken into the London home of his friend, linguist Henry Higgins. As in Shaw's play, the colonel and the professor bet whether Higgins can transform the way Eliza speaks so that she could pass as a duchess at a fancy party. But in Miller's telling, Pickering suspects Eliza has been replaced by an imposter. Holmes agrees to investigate, and, in order to infiltrate the Higgins household, poses as a Sicilian-born American gangster in need of lessons in the King's English. A notorious Robert Louis Stevenson character joins the over-the-top plot, in which Watson acts at times like an action hero. This fictional crossover isn't in the same league as Philip Purser-Hallard's Sherlock Holmes: The Spider's Web, which features Oscar Wilde characters.
