It's fun to think of Sherlock and John tooling around your own home territory and interacting with your state's historical figures. To enhance this effect, there are historical photographs of locations the two visited reproduced within the text-- play houses, race courses and mines.

It's written well enough, although the historical aspects are the star of the book and not the famous pair of detectives or the mysteries (which were pretty straightforward and didn't really need a super sleuth to solve them).

Since I live in the area and am interested in the history, I would have given the book a solid

However, one of the mysteries revolves around copper baron Marcus Daly's famous racing stallion, Tammany. I'm a horse lover and breeder, and so I was especially looking forward to this one. The solution to the mystery as why no mares were gotten pregnant, is unfortunately, absolutely ludicrous and leaves both writer and editor with egg on their faces. If a mystery is going to hinge on a certain event such as the breeding of horses, then it needs to fall within the realm of possibility.

Here's the spoiler: A mare would be put in with the stallion for breeding. But then, in the middle of the night, the mare was switched with a mare owned by a rival breeder - only the second mares were bred. In reality, the first mare would have been bred within ten minutes after being put in with the stallion. I think the author envisaged a romantic evening by the happy couple followed by topping the night with a romantic encounter after they got to know each other well enough --heehee.

For this it lost a star, and so ended up with ( )

The author has clearly researched the time & place for his pastiche mystery which brings Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson to a mining town in Montana.

Unfortunately the characters of Holmes and Watson share only their names with Conan Doyle's characters. The author fails to make these two great detectives "live again."

This might have been a good mystery story with different and original detectives. But if you set out to write a Sherlock Holmes story, you need to evoke their characters and write in a style that honors the original.

I stopped halfway through the book. I couldn't let the travesty continue. ( )