Book Log 2013 #26: The Baker Street Letters by Michael Robertson

Lawyer Reggie Heath has just moved his legal practice into a building on Baker Street in London, and was in such a hurry to sign a sweetheart lease that he misses the one aspect of the lease that's not exactly boilerplate - Reggie's practice is now responsible for answering all letters sent to the building by people who write Sherlock Holmes, and failing to do so (or going public with the practice) leads to significant penalties.

Thankfully, Reggie has his brother Nigel, whose legal career is in a kind of perilous limbo, to handle the letters. But when he comes across one from a girl in Los Angeles seeking her father, who is somehow connected to a geologic project whose plans were attached, he takes up the case, and eventually flies out to LA to find the now-adult girl. Problem is he does so on the day he has a hearing about getting his law license back, and also on the day a member of the first is found dead in Nigel's cubicle. Reggie takes it upon himself to go to LA to find his brother and hopefully smooth things over with the local bar and Scotland Yard. But he gets forced onto the Holmes case when a man in LA turns up dead and Nigel is arrested.

I can't say I was hooked by this book - there's a lot of time spent in taxis and hotel rooms where things slow down - though the plot (which involves the LA subway and the entertainment industry) is interesting. Funny thing here is that if I followed my usual rule about series and started with this, the first book in the series, I don't know if I'd have kept with it. But having enjoyed the third book, and liking parts of this one, it's a series I'm going to stick with.

(Random observation - for a book written in 2009, there's a suspicious lack of technology involved. No one seems to have a cell phone, for example. Not a problem, just odd.)