March 29, 2008

The Black Dove by Steve Hockensmith

Some of my friends might disagree that The Black Dove is a cozy, but I think it's close enough. Besides, I really liked the new book by Steve Hockensmith, author of Holmes on the Range, a book that was very popular with our patrons at the library.

Gus and Otto Amlingmeyer are a pair of cowboys in the Old West who want to be detectives. Their hero is Sherlock Holmes (they can't get enough of his adventures, which they read about in pulp magazines) and Gus in particular tries to use the great detective's methods of deduction to solve crimes.

The West isn't really a place for a couple brothers who think with their heads rather than their fists, so they don't have much luck getting work as detectives. So they make a case their own when a friend of theirs (Dr. Chan from On the Wrong Track) is murdered.

There's a little bit of salty language in The Black Dove, along with some violence. But this is still a book that I would recommend to my mother (82 years old and reads more than I do!), so I will recommend it to you, too.

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