Mycroft and Sherlock, by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Mycroft and Sherlock was a huge (and terrific) surprise to me.

I knew that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was both a former NBA player and a writer; I’ve read and enjoyed some of his columns and was familiar with the titles of his non-fiction work. But I had no idea that he wrote fiction, too. Imagine my surprise when I discovered Mycroft & Sherlock in the new mysteries section of the library.

That Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? I thought. The basketball player? The columnist? Writing about Sherlock Holmes and his brother? This is awesome! I shoved it into my sturdy “library bag.”

It was more than awesome.

Mycroft’s best friend Cyrus Douglas has just lost a cargo ship and must travel to see what can be salvaged from the shipwreck. This leaves his charity school in need of assistance. Mycroft persuades his younger brother Sherlock, currently obsessed with a series of murders in London, to substitute teach at the charity school. (Opinion: Yikes! But he might fit in with the substitute teachers at my teen's high school.) When one of the orphans dies of a drug overdose, Sherlock begins to investigate. Meanwhile, Mycroft has uncovered a mystery of his own involving the opium trade. The two brothers’ simultaneous investigations prove to be connected, but can they learn to trust each other enough to solve the cases together?

I’m not a huge Sherlock Holmes fan and the few other Sherlock-inspired novels I’ve read have been fine, but nothing exciting for me. This book excited me.

There’s all the usual things you’d expect of a book with the infamous detective as a character.

Clever plotting. Interesting characters who deduce important things from details that most of us would overlook. Well-researched historical details, including the rampant opium trade and use during that time period.

But what I truly loved was the relationships between the characters.

  • Mycroft’s relationship with the supersmart African Cyrus Douglas, and how they rely on and trust one another.

Cyrus has to keep his intelligence hidden from the world, though. This leads to situations where he must “play dumb” with his employees, even when he’s their boss and the richest man in the room.  For example, he funds a charity school for young boys. But he can’t openly tell the boys or the teachers that he is the director of the school. So he pretends to be the trusted employee of a fictional man who is benevolent, sickly, and never seen by the pupils. Only a few people realize the truth. Mycroft is one of them.

  • The relationship between Mycroft and Sherlock is intriguing, too.

Sherlock is still in school but as you’d expect, he’s a difficult student to handle. Easily bored. Manipulative. Arrogant. Older brother Mycroft is both exasperated and concerned for his young brother. He feels an obligation and love toward him that young Sherlock seems incapable of seeing or returning. There’s a heart-wrenching backstory about the brothers, which the authors use well.

This is a well-written novel. It’s a sequel to Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse’s Mycroft, but you don’t have to have read the first novel to enjoy this one. I hope the duo write more about the Holmes brothers.

(This review of Mycroft and Sherlock first appeared on Goodreads.)

If you enjoyed Mycroft and Sherlock, you may also enjoy The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl, as it also takes place during this time period. It has a more "literary" flavor, though: Mycroft and Sherlock is more rapidly paced. Also check out C.S. Harris's Sebastian St. Cyr series, which take place a few decades earlier in the 19th century and has similar pacing and social issue concerns. For Sherlock Holmes fans, check out Laurie R. King's Island of the Mad, which features Sherlock and his wife, Mary Russell (or Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes!), as they search for a missing mad aunt in Venice and encounter the growing forces of fascism in 1920s Italy.