This Sherlock Holmes pastiche matches the great detective against Count Dracula. It's set just after 'Hound of the Baskervilles' and refers to that book quite a lot. Holmes and Watson are drawn back to the moors of the Hound and find that Dracula has set up shop there in his bid to spread vampirism across the world.

Unfortunately the book suffers a great deal by comparison to Loren D. Estleman's brilliant 'Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula' (or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count), written some 20 years earlier. The idea has also been covered in Fred Saberhagan's ' The Holmes-Dracula File'.

'Tangled Skein' offers nothing really new on the idea and has little of the 'authentic' feel of other better pastiches (Estleman's Dracula and Jeckyll & Hyde books, Nicholas Meyer's novels, Larry Millett's first book and some of the better short story pastiches). Although the author has cleverly woven Dracula into the story of the Baskervilles the tale lacks any real narrative drive. I found myself skimming the last few chapters. Although the author quotes from Conan Doyle there's little feel of the original stories here.

The Estleman is not only much closer in tone to Conan Doyle's (or should I say Watson's) writing but cleverly interweaves Holmes into Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' making Holmes appear to be, as it were, between the chapters of Stoker, and easily explaining away why Holmes never appeared in Stoker's book.

All in all this is a solid attempt at an interesting idea but one that falls short of the mark left by others. It's not bad, it's just not memorable. Try Estleman instead.

This is a very significant book about the general opinons of Western people about middle eastern-arabs at the end of 19th century. The tale is about how tourists on a steamer have been taken hostage by a gang of arabs, and how "the heroic" british army saved them. What is behind the tale is what has been codified by kipling: "the burden of the white man". The superior civilized Anglo saxons and their mission toward uncivilised barabarians. The depiction of natives in mild racists words is what, unfortunately, has not changed so much in western opinions (even if hidden behind layers of politically correct). Very instructive for whoever is interested in the root of racisms, as described by E. Said in "orientalism". A very funny part of the book is the contrast between the arrogant french tourist who at the begining criticizes the wise brits, but by the end is grateful and convinced. Replace brits with americans, and the book could have been written in 2001.

This edition by Penguin contains the full-length Sherlock Holmes novel THE VALLEY OF FEAR along with selected short stories from THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES and HIS LAST BOW. THE VALLEY OF FEAR was written after Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in 1892, but is set before Holmes' disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls. THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES opens with a story that shows that Holmes didn't die in his struggle with Professor Moriarty after all.

These stories show a decline in Conan Doyle's writing. As Iain Pears wrote in the introduction to another Penguin edition of Holmes stories, in the latter half of his life Conan Doyle turned to mysticism and spiritualism and was increasingly unable to portray the cold rationalism of Sherlock Holmes. Many of the stories lack motivation. The story HIS LAST BOW, which is final story in the canon according to Holmesian time, is a poorly-plotted bit of propaganda for England in World War I.

There are footnotes to each story, compiled by Ed Glinert. An expert on literature set in London, Glinert explains the geographical settings of the Holmes stories, and defines anachronistic terms that are no longer use. He also points out the mistakes Arthur Conan Doyle frequently made in his stories, which are often quite amusing (contradicting timelines, Conan Doyles' incomplete understanding of obscure sciencs, etc).

Because of the illuminating introduction and the helpful footnotes, I'd recommend over any others this edition of THE VALLEY OF FEAR AND SELECTED CASES

Meyer continues his version of Sherlock Holmes with a tale of Holmes' lost years after the "Moriarty Problem." Holmes becomes a violinist for the Paris Opera and through the intervention of Irene Adler, becomes involved in the strange case of the "opera ghost." There are many problems with this novel. Watson's presence is sorely missed and efforts to replace his role with characters from the opera are unsuccessful. Irene Adler's inclusion is an uneccessary distraction and is used soley to comment on Holmes' sexual repression. The case itself is so familiar to the reader that only the inclusion of Holmes changes the basic story, thus there are no surprises.(who doesn't know the basics of Laroux's Phantom?) This was a very disappointing sequel to Meyer's other Holmes' novels and wasn't owrth the wait.

I liked this book because it combined my two favourite characters: the phantom of the opera (Erik) and Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock stayed the remarkable genius that he is(even though he blundered miserbly sometimes-but,hey,YOU try to do better). But I was really disappointed with the treatment of Erik. Meyer calls him 'the creature' and makes him more insane than even in the original book! Personally, I the most appealling thing about Erik is that he IS a sympathetic character hopelessly in love with Christine Daae. This is why I 'liked' the Canary Trainer, not 'loved' it. (P.S.-Having Gaston Leroux as the music instucter was a creative touch)

But it's not as bad as all that. Nevertheless if you want to read Meyer's Holmes pastiches I'd recommend starting with the other two (_The Seven Per Cent Solution_ and _The West End Horror_). Meyer at his best is splendid.

If you do so, then be sure to ignore the misinformation in the Kirkus Reviews excerpt above. _The West End Horror_ has nothing to do with Jack the Ripper; it concerns a pair of grisly murders that take place in London's theater district. I assume the reviewer is thinking of Edward Hanna's _The Whitechapel Horrors_.

The only reason why I bought this book was because my teacher chose it for his class.

I ended up reading and re-reading the chapters and supplementing it with a more practical book like, "Teach Yourself Java", Lemay, et al.

There are few examples, and the explanations were hideously twisted and academic. If this book were about breathing, it would explain the finer points of vaccuum differentials while we would all be blue and dead on the floor. Java's not easy, but it's really not THIS hard.

The fun started in section 1.7 where it began to slaughter classes and methods, and those letters starting turning into cyrillic and jumping around the page while I sipped caffeine to stay awake to keep my professor happy. And the fun didn't let up from there.

I started reading this book with absolutely no programming experience. It gives a good introduction to very elementary ideas like strings and arrays for someone who has never used them. But treatment of even basic object oriented concepts such as classes and encapsulation is very poor. After reading this book I went through Patrick Naughton's Java Handbook, which does a better job of access modifiers in only a few pages.

If you've never programmed before, you will probably benefit from going through the first couple of chapters, as I did. But you will hardly have learned anything at all about Java.

it's a realy boook I have read. I have had a couple java books, but "programming in java" is the best book I recommand. The authors used short sentances to explain enough knowledge. A lot of authors used long and unclear sentances to talk about one little concept again and again, which made the concept even more confused, and sometimes, they didn't give you enough details about the concept. ANyway, I think "programming with Java" is such a book I ahve read and I hope the author can write more good books like this one.

Believe it or not, Bill Holmes almost got a contract to sell this gun back in the 80's, but it was dropped in favor of the H+K MP-5. Perhaps the reason for this was that the MP-5 actually had an EJECTOR for discarding spent rounds, essential for allowing any sub machine gun to work properly. Strangely enough, this gun doesn't seem to have an ejector (or anything resembling or acting as one), nor are there any instructions for making it. That, along with the fact that there are references to diagrams that don't exist suggest that either Bill Holmes knows nothing or the stupid publisher has omitted essential material. Either way : Avoid this book like the plague.

Never tried building it. You'd need a barrel and a lathe to make it. Making it as a pistol would be fun (you can get a licence for that here). What annys me is the reference to chemicals that I don't thing is available here in Europe (and that the measurements is not in metric, of course).

This is a very good book defanatly worth the read. However it is still typical Bill Holmes type of book he dosent go into real detail on the design of the gun just this is what you need and this is how you put it togeather better than his last book though he dose go over makeing the magazine from scratch but you still have to buy a manufactured barrel and you must have a lathe to machine some of the parts however the end product is very finished and if care is taken at least as good of quality as anything that you can buy comercaly if your looking for something eaiser to build with just very common hand tools i would recomend "Expedient Homemade Firearms" by P.A. Luty.

There are at bottom two sorts of Sherlock Holmes short story, and they appeal to different sorts of reader.

The first is born of the attempt to create what Sir Arthur's son Adrian Conan Doyle called "stories of the old vintage." Of these, I personally think the younger Doyle's work with John Dickson Carr (in _The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes_) is probably the best, and some of the other really good ones are collected in Richard Lancelyn Green's _The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. Arguably the finest current practitioner of the art is Denis O. Smith. At any rate, this book is not of that sort.

The second is more or less typified by Ian Charnock's recent publication (in _The Elementary Cases of Shelock Holmes_) of several stories alleged to spring from the pen of Stamford, who had known Holmes as a young man and in fact introduced him to Watson. These are cases of primarily historical interest, moderate entertainment value, and debatable authenticity, wherein both the historical interest and the entertainment value depend heavily on maintaining the appearance of authenticity. A single false note, even one which might have been forgivable in the other sort of work or even explained away as a literary embellishment, can bring the whole thing crashing down.

This book is of that sort. The stories themselves are better than those in Charnock's collection, but the reader looking solely for cries of "The game's afoot!" and adventures that recapture Doyle's magic will be disappointed.

The conceit of the present volume is that there were certain cases which it would have been imprudent to publish during the lifetimes of Holmes, Watson, and others, and yet which Watson believed it worthwhile to set down for posterity. There are seven stories in this collection, all of them historical cases in which (this volume asserts) Holmes played a part not recorded by history but here described by Watson in documents written up and sealed in his old age.

As a result, there are two difficulties for the reader seeking a transport of pure entertainment. First, the denouements are lacking; and second, the stories have few of the romantic "literary" flourishes Watson used in order to embellish and fictionalize his published accounts of Holmes's cases.

These features would be excusable and even welcome if the manuscript in question were authentic. Unfortunately, however, there seem to me to be grave doubts on that score.

One reason is the character and history of Professor James Moriarty, who appears in one tale which purports to be the true history of the adventures of the Final Problem, the Empty House, and Charles Augustus Milverton.

In the published version of "The Final Problem," Moriarty is presented as having made his international reputation at the age of twenty-one with a treatise on the binomial theorem. I have always taken this to be a product of Watson's fancy, as the binomial theorem was well known and understood long before Moriarty's time; it is hard to imagine what he could have had to say about it that would have garnered him such international fame.

Yet in the present volume, Moriarty is not only credited again with this treatise (when there is no reason to add any embellishments) but also given credit for being the first man in two centuries to prove Fermat's Last Theorem as well as the first in a century to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. This is historical and mathematical nonsense -- historical, because had Moriarty proven either of these famous conjectures he would have been the first, not the second, to do so; and mathematical, because once a theorem is proven, it is proven. (Sometimes mathematicians discover alternative proofs by shorter routes or different methods. But if this is what Holmes had meant, he would presumably have said so; Watson presents him here as possessing mathematical expertise and familiarity with its literature.)

Even more serious is that the end of this tale involves Watson in speculation that Holmes may have committed a dire act that, frankly, seems altogether out of character: the cold-blooded murder of a blackmailer threatening the reputation of the Crown. Granted, Holmes sometimes played fast and loose with the law in a good cause; granted, he sometimes went very far out on a limb in protection of queen/king and country. But this seems wrong.

(It might also be argued that I am illicitly judging the "real" Holmes using the "fictionalized" Holmes as a standard -- that, indeed, Watson remade Holmes to some extent as a literary character, and did so in part by suppressing this act. I am unmoved; I shall believe this only on much stronger evidence than is presented here. And the authenticity of this manuscript is, after all, the very point at issue.)

Moreover, I have another party on my side: Donald Thomas himself, in a short afterword, credits himself as the "author" in what would surely be a brazen claim were it not true.

I cannot agree with the readers who think this book is not worth rereading. There are some fine tales here in which, for example, Holmes is involved (as his admirers have always known he was) in the creation and development of forensic science. While not as gripping as the original Holmes tales, they are surely not as uninteresting as some readers have suggested.

But I am afraid I must withhold the judgment of authenticity. And under the scheme I set out in the first few paragraphs above, the "historical" tales are therefore not as interesting or as entertaining as they might have been. The manuscript was produced by a remarkable skilled hand, but in the end I think we must pronounce it to be a clever forgery.

The premise behind this book is simple: a number of criminal cases around the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries are presented to include the involvement of Sherlock Holmes. The cases are "secret" because of one reason or another, including the involvement of high profile clients.

While the idea is a good one - and has been used before with the several versions of Sherlock Holmes investigating the activities of Jack the Ripper - the execution is sometimes frustrating. The cases under investigations are resolved in history, and so the "solutions" would have come about without Holmes' involvement (although Donald Thomas writes is such a way as you wouldn't think so).

I think that, for me, the main frustration is that Holmes is rarely there for the end, having done his investigations and left it to his clients and/or the authorities to finish the matter. While it is plainly established in he original Sherlock Holmes stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that Holmes often resolved cases and left the credit to the official police force, somehow these stories make this quite frustrating.

However, the way in which Holmes and the investigations themselves are written is certainly good fare for fans of the Great Detective, although you might want to have a case in which he plays an active role in the conclusion handy in case you feel the frustrations I did.

At first I thought this book would be intriguing, unfortunatly it was not a page turner, I almost had to force myself to finish the book. And the author had the gall to insinuate that Holmes' would murder to solve a case. Not really worth reading.

A quite awful book, every plot point requires the most unlikely coincidences and illogical behavior. Some of the errors are so silly that I read it a second time just to spot them. Here is a good one to give you a feel for the whole book. Holmes offers his guest tea and biscuits, with "plenty of good honey and butter" for the biscuits. As anyone who knows anything about the English, as apparently author Boothe does not, when an Englishman says biscuit, he means what we call in the States a cookie.

Why give a book such a sensationalistic title when the so-called secret is revealed within 20 pages? One can only presume that the author couldn't come up with something more appropriate or sought to maximise readership.

The book itself is fraught with numerous problems, including an unconvincing portrayal of Sherlock Holmes and an extraordinarily clichéd portrayal of the villain behind the events in the prologue. This latter made me wonder whether I should read any further.

In terms of it being a detective novel, the quality of the deductions is variable.

There is also an attempt to build some continuity with other non-Doyle-authored Holmes stories. While this is appreciated, I must say that the choice of 'The Seven-per-cent Solution' was rather jarring, in that while the feat of breaking Holmes' cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud is indeed chronicled in that book (as specified here), it also makes it plain that Professor Moriarty was a delusion of Holmes' drug-addled brain, whereas in this book Moriarty was truly as portrayed by Doyle. Very clumsy indeed.

Don't put this one high on your list of books to read !

Ignore the bad reviews! This romp is a little gem. Yes, the secret is revealed early on, but it's a stunner and introduces a character who becomes an excellent foil for Holmes. Certainly not as wayward as some pastiches, but reasonably true to the spirit of Conan Doyle. There are plenty of poor Holmes books out there, but this isn't one of them. Grab it while it's available. I await the sequel, which I understand Gary F. Boothe is now writing.

Disappointing throughout...A padded short story...Characters have silly actions and motives...Holmes milks a job so he can continue to eat for free.

I found this book thoroughly offensive. As another reviewer said here, the characters were obviously modern-day. Can you imagine anyone who really lived in Sherlock Holmes' England saying that he was going to "take a semester off from medical school?"!!!

From the first time Holmes and Watson enter the ancient monastery, now family manor, you feel the chill that permeates the stone walls. Carole Bugge' has created an ambience that suits two of literature's most beloved fictional characters perfectly. She has given us a ghost, a seance, well defined mysterious characters and, certainly not least, Holmes and Watson together again. I found myself caught up in finding out what was "really" going on in the secretive family of Lord Charles Cary. I felt a part of the author's well described Victorian, dark abbey on the moors atmosphere. The characters are interesting and all have you looking at them for more answers than they are ready to divulge. I enjoyed Holmes and dear Watson as the author lovingly guides them from page to page.I did not purchase the book to compare Ms. Bugge's style of writing to Sir Arthur's. I will always know exactly where on my bookshelves I can find the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and can revisit them whenever I want. I wanted to read a new book that brought Holmes and Watson to the moors again and to an intriguing place called Torre Abbey, which possibly hosts a ghostly presence. I wanted to delight again as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves in the midst of another case which, perhaps, was not as it seemed to be. I wanted to read a well executed and enjoyable mystery ....and, I did in The Haunting Of Torre Abbey!

While it wasn't the most exciting book I've read, "The Cost of Rights" was a refreshing twist on the taxes issue. It challenged opponents of the current tax system or any tax system to think critically on the subject. I felt that Holmes' and Sunstein's approach was more effective than a listing of statistics. Rather than explaining economic reasons for taxes, they brought it to a level that related more to readers. Everyone has a reason to be interested in the preservation of his or her own rights. Without taxes for government support, we could not be guaranteed equal representation before the law. Taxes pay for law enforcement and other government services that are vital to our liberty. Without taxes, no one would every truly own property. Taxes serve as the standard for American's to exist and be governed by. They do not discern our morals, but instead preserve our rights. In "The Cost of Rights", the case for taxes was presented in such a way that I couldn't see liberty without some sort of tax system.

It is the fashion to disparage government and all its works these days. Sunstein and Holmes have given this timely reminder that Constitutional and property rights only have meaning if they can be enforced BY the government (that is, by courts, executive agencies, police departments, disaster relief, and the like). The book is flawed to the extent that seems to call for affirmative rights to public services (social workers, police) to be enforced by judges. Such a state of affairs would totally undercut the majority-rule principle of democratic society. However, the book is a welcome antidote to the trendy, bumper-sticker diatribes against the evils of government. We need a serious dialogue on the proper (and limited) functions of government in the new global economy, not more slogans. If you like this book, also look at Garry Wills's "Necessary Evil" (which does a better job with historical background) and Brinkley's "New Federalist Papers."

This book covers an important issue that is rarely bought up: liberty, rights etc. depend of an enforcement mechanism.

And this enforcement mechanism is government. Weak governments (such as those of the current Russia) cannot guarantee property rights or any other rights for their citizens. Anyone who feels they can establish their rights without government should visit Somalia and see how easy or difficult it is in the absence of government.

How would you establish right to a plot of land, for instance, without a title, some means of enforcing property laws ?

The Founding Fathers most certainly recognized the value of government -- thats why they wrote the Constitution, because the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate. They also provided the government with the means to fund itself -- through tarrifs, which are just another form of taxes. This is something the authors do indeed support, and at least two of the 1-star reviews lead me to conclude the authors never got beyond the title.

Finally, the Constition does indeed provide powers to the States. But is unclear why this should necessarily please someone who claims that governments take away all rights, since the states are also run by governments. In fact, historically, the states have had practically all the powers (public schools, eminent domain, property taxes) etc. etc. that libertarian types find distasteful.

This book is NOT a call for higher taxes, and it recognizes the tax-and-spend problems as well.