From international bestselling author Anthony Horowitz (Midsummer murders, Foyles war, Alex Rider, Hawthorne) comes 3 new books about one of literatures most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes, like you have never heard him before. The Red Circle, first installment in the upcoming 3 book series “Becoming Sherlock” is a story set in a dystopian London in the near future. At the same time a passenger plane goes down in central London, Dr. Watson finds a man naked and beaten in the street. The man has no memory, no past but seem to inhabit exceptional gifts of detection. This is the start of a mystery that unravels rapidly with one burning question at the center of it, who is Sherlock Holmes?

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Becoming Sherlock: The Red Circle‘ was excellent. An original idea, executed with style and conviction, delivering a genre-bending story with a solid mystery at its heart. It was clearly designed to be an audiobook, and it made the most of that medium without dropping into the see-how-immersive-our-sound-effiects-are? mode that I usually find distracting. 

Ipicked this book up thinking that I was going to get a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, with Anthony Horowitz producing new Sherlock Holmes novels in the same way that he writes now James Bond novels. ‘Becoming Sherlock’ was cleverer and more original than that. It was an engaging reworking of Sherlock Holmes, set in the near future and with some twists to the characters. 

I loved that, although it used characters from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, it changed them in fundamental and surprising ways. It was a bold thing to do, but it worked. 

The near-future Britain-in-decline setting gave a lot of freedom for twisting the story into something new, while weaving in elements that are linked to Victorian London, like the use of horse-drawn vehicles and gas-powered lights, alongside gleaming tower blocks. laptop computers and crashing passenger jets. 

The mystery was complicated and exciting. A big part of the mystery was who the man who becomes known as Sherlock Holmes is. He himself has no memory of his name and only fragmented and confusing memories of his past. He also has astonishing recuperative abilities and a logical mind that equals the abilities of his namesake. 

The story is told from John Watson’s point of view, but, unlike the Conan Doyle version, this isn’t a first-person account written in admiration of his extraordinary friend, the great detective, Sherlock Holmes. We see John Watson from the outside, but we learn more about his thoughts than Sherlock’s. I liked Watson. He came across as a competent and practical, recovering from the trauma and injuries of war and struggling to find his place in a disjointed world. 

I won’t go into how the other characters differ from their namesakes, as part of the fun of the novel is finding that out. I admired that the characters felt real, which made their divergence from who I expected them to be even more engaging. 

This is the first book in a trilogy. This novel wasn’t a cliff-hanger; the mystery of The Red Circle was solved, but I was left with a lot of questions that I’m looking forward to having answered in the next two books, not least of which is who it is that is ‘becoming Sherlock’. 

I strongly recommend the audiobook version. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample of Alfred Enoch’s performance. 

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