[.ca] Sherlock Holmes and The Bizarre Alibi (ISBN 1413468845)

Another game afoot!:
In the 1980s, Frank Thomas wrote a number of novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and all were published in German, I believe, but not all in English due to a paperback publisher going paws-up in the midst of the series. Now some of these are being brought to print, or reprinted as the case may be, by Xlibris. Events of the present novel seem to take place right after the previous Thomas-authored adventure of the Panamanian Girls. Holmes and Watson are called to France to investigate a mysterious theft from the Louvre, then back to England to deal with a baffling kidnapping of a 6-month-old child from the family of Britain's chief economic advisor, a strange night attack on Miss Regina Braham in her own bedroom, and a suspicious buyup of DeBeers diamond mining stock. All the cases conveniently turn out to be connected, and the identity and motive of the ultimately-revealed villain took me by surprise. As usual in the later Holmes novels of Frank Thomas, Holmes employs a fairly large set of shady individuals with slightly illegal talents, in the course of his investigation, and gets a lot of help from Mycroft's multitalented aide Wakefield Orloff. I read the novel in a few hours, with a permanent smile on my face... the company was very pleasant, Holmes was true to his origins, the reader's intelligence was not insulted, and the plot and action held my interest throughout. As with all the Xlibris books I have inspected, misprints are very few (I noted only a case of misplaced quotation marks), but someone needed to write down the word "bizarre" on a scrap of paper and tape it up where they could view it constantly. It is spelled correctly on the book's front cover, but not on the spine! It is spelled correctly in the text, but not on the title pages or on the page headers!