A Nice, but Surprising, 4.5 Star Review for Chronicles of The Lost Years

The timing couldn’t be nicer, really.  With the new Sherlock Holmes movie coming out next month, and the yummy casting of Robert Downie Jnr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, we’ve finally got a casting that’s interesting in all sorts of respects.

Have you seen the trailer?  It looks delicious!

I posted about this movie a few weeks ago, and how I couldn’t wait to see it.   After all, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlock Holmes fan, and was a card-carrying committee member of the Sherlock Holmes Society.  And I’ve written two books about him.

The trailer got me all excited for another reason.  The books I wrote were actually romantic suspense books in disguise, and if I had got to cast the movies of my books, then Robert Downey Jnr. and Jude Law would have done very nicely indeed in the roles.  If you watch the trailer of the new movie, then you’ll have perfect visual to accompany you when you read my books.

The review I received the other day recognized that Chronicles was a romance in disguise, too.  Bravo!  And I didn’t get dinged for it, either. The reviewer is clearly another reader who likes her heroes with brains.

One of the posts on my blog that gets the most traffic — well, actually, that outstrips all other posts for traffic by a factor of ten or so, is “Really Smart Heroes — Brains Over Brawn Is Better.“  I discuss Sherlock Holmes in that post as one of the heroes with a brain, amongst others, and the fact that I used him as a romantic hero in Chronicles. Clearly, the idea of a hero having a clue appeals to a lot of romance readers, because the stats on the blog continue to spike, month after month.

So I was delighted to get this review in my mail box the other day.  It was a pleasure to read it:

“Chronicles of the Lost Years is a Sherlock Holmes story in the best tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle. Dr. Watson is, as in the original tales, the narrator, and the story features other well known Doyle characters such as Sherlock Holmes, his brother, Mycroft, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes’s adversary Moriarity, and a couple of others.

While there is a little bit of overlap with one or two of Doyle’s tales, it is only in passing to provide continuity to this story. What Ms. Cooper-Posey does is take, for instance, the time-frame between Holmes’s final standoff with Moriarity and his reappearance in London and provide a wonderful telling of what could very well have happened to him in those years. That is the main focus of the Chronicles, though a couple of other “gaps” are filled in as well. A love interest is also introduced for Holmes in the guise of Elizabeth Sigerson, who starts out as a bit of a mystery for Holmes to solve, although she is first introduced as a patient for Dr. Watson.

Chronicles of the Lost Years is a wonderful read for all ages. This reviewer really enjoyed reading it not only due to a great like of mysteries every so often, but, in essence, cutting my teeth on Sherlock Holmes. I came into this book with an open mind as every author will have his or her own stamp when writing within a different author’s “world” and I was very pleasantly surprised. Ms. Cooper-Posey wrote Chronicles with the proper balance of staying true to Mr. Doyle’s creation while putting her own stamp on his works.”

Gabby, for Beautiful Reads.

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