Wiggins: Son of Sherlock
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
On New Year's Day 1891, Sherlock Holmes summons the limping street urchin, Wiggins, to Baker Street and decrees he must die at dawn. Wiggins, however, has other plans. To fulfil the dying wish of his mother, Irene Adler, he schemes with his two formidable American aunties to keep two important facts from the great detective: Mrs. Hudson is actually his Aunt Grizelda, and he is both Holmes' child and a girl pretending to be a boy. Through a series of mysterious letters Adler bequeathed to Wiggins, the dark backstory of her parents and all their long-kept family secrets unravel. To flee the mad King of Bohemia trying to claim Wiggins as his heir, Holmes and Wiggins begin their Great Hiatus. From Mycroft to Moriarty, from Dr. John H. Watson to the Baker Street Irregulars, from P.T. Barnum to Jumbo the Elephant, Wiggins learns little is what it seems. Slowly learning to trust each other, Holmes and Wiggins travel from London to Reichenbach Falls to New York City to a small farm in Canada which holds the secrets of their family history. Together, they correct the errors in Watson’s tales, bond over Wiggins’ disability, drop their masquerades, and deduce a father and daughter future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ungainly Sherlock Holmes pastiche from Palmer (When Fenelon Falls) takes considerable liberties with Conan Doyle's characters. Early in 1891, Holmes summons Wiggins, the resourceful street urchin who led the Baker Street Irregulars in the original stories, to Baker Street, where the detective asks the 14-year-old to fake his death as part of a plot to forestall the machinations of Professor Moriarty. As the subtitle indicates, Wiggins is Holmes's son in Palmer's telling, a fact of which the sleuth is initially unaware. Holmes goes on to explain that this scheme involves his later faking his own death. During their conversation, Holmes dismisses Watson as "a certain scribbling physician" and otherwise denigrates his friend. The overly busy, meandering plot includes speculation about Jack the Ripper that identifies him as a certain canonical character. Labored prose ("If you find this Sherlock excessive, Perplexed Reader, you have yet to meet the bodacious bedlam of the rest of my irregular family," Wiggins asserts) doesn't make swallowing all this any easier. Only the most broad-minded Sherlockians will enjoy this one.
