The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth

April 1, 2019
Set in London in 1915, Goldberg’s enjoyable third Daughter of Sherlock Holmes mystery (after 2018’s A Study in Treason) finds Holmes’s daughter, Joanna Blalock, searching for cryptographer Alistair Ainsworth, who has been kidnapped by Germans. Joanna, Dr. John Watson, and the doctor’s son (and her husband), John Jr., join forces with the police and naval intelligence officers to scour the city for Ainsworth, who, they discover, is part of a high-ranking unit charged with ensuring that the Germans can’t decipher British naval codes. Like her late father (who died in 1903, according to Goldberg), Joanna works through the logic of any puzzle presented, large or small, and fans of traditional mysteries will appreciate the way each clue is laid out for Joanna to piece together. John Jr. does an able job as narrator as the action builds to a satisfying finale. The many references to the original Sherlock Holmes adventures will please Conan Doyle fans. Agent: Scott Mendel, Mendel Media Group.

April 1, 2019
Joanna Watson, the daughter of Sherlock Holmes, continues to pursue the espionage investigations that have recently become her specialty (A Study in Treason, 2018, etc.). November 1915. Dr. Alexander Verner suddenly appears at 221B Baker St. with a story for the Watson family about how he was taken in a carriage with blacked-out windows to visit a patient whose identity he was not told but who managed to communicate that he was being held captive. After Dr. Verner leaves, Joanna ponders the problem together with her husband, John Jr., and her father-in-law, Holmes amanuensis Dr. John H. Watson, concluding that the unknown man is being held by German agents who may also target Dr. Verner. They arrive at Verner's door only to find Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard investigating the man's disappearance. Lt. Dunn of Naval Intelligence, called to join the party, reluctantly identifies the mysterious patient as Alistair Ainsworth, a citizen who's highly prized by German spies. Because Verner's spilled chloroform on the floor, Toby Two, a hound with an amazingly sensitive nose, can track the odor to a deserted house where they find the body of Dr. Verner, tortured and strangled, but no sign of Ainsworth. Dunn finally acknowledges that the abduction of Ainsworth, one of four people in a top-secret cryptanalysis unit charged with making the British naval codes fail-safe, could spell disaster. Ainsworth's fellow workers, all brilliant and unorthodox in their methods, are both suspects and sources of help in recovering him before the Germans can break him and get the sensitive information they seek. Using her father's methods, Joanna leads the search for Ainsworth, who, despite being moved from place to place in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, keeps hiding clues in plain sight for Joanna and her crew to follow. Fans of all things Sherlock-ian will delight in Joanna, so like her father and already training her schoolboy son, Johnny, in the methods that have solved so many cases like this exceptionally tricky one.

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May 1, 2019
The third in Goldberg's A Daughter of Sherlock Holmes series (following A Study in Treason, 2018) finds the infamous detective's daughter enjoying her celebrity as a London sleuth. Her husband, Dr. John Watson, Jr., narrates Joanna's deductive feats of derring-do. This time a cryptographer has been taken captive by the Germans, and Team Watson must find him before he can be tortured into revealing secrets that could compromise the Royal Navy and its WWI strategy. Fans of the original mysteries will get a chuckle out of the antic language, and there is a mercurial Mary Poppins appeal to this not-to-be-trifled-with heroine that will appeal to fans beyond Baker Street.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)