This book was a fun Sherlock Holmes experience! This story is told by Watson, and it was a fun read with lots of footnotes and asides that gave the book quite a personality. The story was good, and I feel that the way it was written, like Watson's personal notes on their adventure, added another layer of fun to the story.

I had a hard time initially getting into reading this book, however I did enjoy it and by the middle I was hooked.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good mystery and Sherlock Holmes.

This is the fourth book in the series but my first. I was able to enjoy as a stand-alone but can see a benefit of reading the previous books first. I have been a big Sherlock fan from a young age have grown up watch movies with my dad and listening to old episodes of old time radio shows. I sometimes find it had to embrace adaptations from the original Sir Conan Doyle version of Sherlock. This book was well-written and stayed fairly true to Doyle’s Sherlock.

All thoughts and opinions are my own, and in no way have I been influenced by anyone.

I received an advanced digital copy of this book from the author, publisher and Netgalley.com. Thanks to all for the opportunity to read and review. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

As a fan of Holmes and Watson in their various reincarnations, this novel fell short and flat for me. The author tried too hard to be clever.

2 out of 5 stars.

I'm going to preface this by saying I love Holmes and Watson. I grew up reading their stories and idolized the characters. Reading Meyer's rendition of these characters, it really fell short for me. There were a few historical inaccuracies that pulled me out of the story, as well.

A fun historical mystery in the vein of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. The author did a good job of capturing the well known personality of Holmes and Watson and I enjoyed the format of the book. A twist to the ending made it a worthwhile read although it was a bit slow to get going in the beginning.

Author Nicholas Meyer (https://www.nicholas-meyer.com) published the novel “The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols: Adapted from the Journals of John H. Watson, M.D.” in 2019. This is his 8th novel. 

I categorize this novel as ‘PG’ because it contains scenes of Violence. The story is set in 1905. The primary character is Dr. John Watson.
 
Holmes brother, Mycroft, approaches Holmes and Watson. A body found in the Thames was a British Secret Service agent. Documents she was carrying implicate the Jews in a world domination conspiracy. Mycroft asks his brother and the Doctor to look into it.
 
The investigation leads Holmes and Watson on a long journey by rail over the Orient Express. They must tread the dangerous ground of Russia to find the answers. Their journey is not without risk.

I enjoyed the 5.5+ hours I spent reading this 244-page Sherlock Holmes mystery. Really, this is more of a low-level spy thriller than a mystery. I do like the selected cover art. I give this novel a 4 out of 5.
 
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This was my first Sherlock Holmes story and I really did enjoy it. It was pretty quick paced and had a great mystery involving Watson and Holmes. For someone new to Holmes and Watson and mysteries, in general, I would definitley recommend this book. It is light, but has a great sense of mystery within the writing. I honestly expected it to be more predictable, but it kept me guessing until the end. I really enjoyed it and Meyer's writing style kept me invested in the plotline.

I liked this take on the classic Sherlock Holmes, but I felt that sometimes it didn't stay true to his character. However, this was an overall enjoyable read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Nicholas Meyers the renown author of the Seven Percent Solution does it again another well written entertaining Sherlock Holmes adventure.Grabbed me from the first pages highly recommend.#netgalley#st.martins

The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer is a treat for all fans Sherlockian! I have enjoyed his prior tales of found manuscripts, primarily The West End Horror which I loved far more than the Seven Per Cent Solution, and The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols is a welcomed and long-awaited edition by Meyer.

Summary
“…She called herself Manya Lippman, and she was…’ Here he hesitated. ‘…in our employ.’
‘A most dedicated agent. She gave her life for those pages.’
‘She did.’ The fact weighed heavily upon him. ‘Kindly return the page with her blood on it.’
Holmes carefully handed over the pink-stained page. With something like reverence, Mycroft folded the paper and slid it into his pocketbook. As he did so, his brother ambled over to the desk, glancing down at his notes.
‘If I am reading correctly,’ he said slowly, ‘ these pages purport to be the minutes of a secret meeting of a conclave of Jews who are plotting to take over the world…”
An agent for her Majesty’s Service, under the leadership of Mycroft Holmes is found dead; murdered. In her possession are documents that detail the minutes of a secret society of powerful, rich Jewish men with plans to control the finances of various countries and establish a base of power to rule behind the scenes of the various governments. It is ingenious. It is dangerous. It is also, in the estimation of Sherlock Holmes, completely fraudulent.
Mycroft Holmes charges his brother Sherlock and Dr. Watson with a mission, to find the source of the protocols and prove them true or false. And then to determine the reasoning behind them. For if they are true, then there is a secret society that is bent on influencing world events. If they are false, then someone is looking to cause catastrophic events and blame the Jewish people for them. It is the winter of 1905 and Europe and Russia in particular are increasingly unstable, these protocols and the people behind them, may tip the world as they know it, into war.
But what Holmes and Watson find in Europe and Russia is a society already bent on change and looking for someone to blame their harsh life and misfortune on.
“…Why don’t they leave?’ I found myself asking. The girl’s pulse was astonishingly strong and regular.
‘Jews are not allowed to travel.’
‘And go where?’ the wool merchant added when my question had been relayed. His own affect and presentation were little different, from a medical standpoint, than those of his child.
‘How do they manage?’ the detective, who had remained silent, now asked in a voice I had never heard before.
Mrs. Walling sighed. ‘They don’t. They exist without living…”
Now Holmes and Watson must find proof of the lies behind the protocols and then get the truth in the hands of Mycroft to dispel them, before more people suffer and the protocols reach a mass audience. An audience that will turn on the Jewish people.

Review
When we think of the persecution of the Jewish people, we immediately think of the Holocaust and we should. But it is important to remind ourselves the bigotry and persecution against the Jewish people had been happening long before Hitler and the Nazi regime and had been happening in places outside of Germany. In fact, pretty much happening and still does, in our own country and many others.
In 1905, Russia was under the rule of Czar Nicholas II, who by all accounts was one of the most incompetent rulers of his time and of any time in the history of mankind. I realize that various streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are running shows on the Romanovs right now and romanticizing their rule and eventual, tragic, assassination. But the reality of their time in power is one of strife and famine and poverty for the Russian people. Besides if you are really getting your history facts from Netflix, how much of an idiot are you? Pick up and open a book already! And not just one.
It is sickening to look at the persecution of a group of people, spanning centuries in the intellectual as well as rural societies of Europe and somehow find a basis for it. The Jewish people lived under a different set of rules and laws in the 19th and 20th centuries and were often the victims of scapegoating long before Nazi Germany came to power. This was just as true in England and America though these two countries may have tried to be somewhat more subtle about it. Much of the propaganda promoting this bigotry was seen and read daily in the local and national newspapers.
It is against this world backdrop that the story of The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols is set.
Nicolas Meyer is a terrific and thought provoking writer, whether he is writing screenplays or novels. There are no cheap thrills here. Each thought and each sentence is carefully crafted to illicit a response or reaction from the reader. His storytelling will not let the reader be unmoved.
What Meyer does so well in this telling is that we see a change in Holmes and Watson as well. A change to the role of women in the world at large and a change in their perception of what power any government should have over its people. The foolish notion that if the powers are doing something they must have a good reason for it and it must be for our own good is a dangerous one. As Holmes and Watson get a more realistic view of the world around them, so do we. We begin to see what has always been right in front of us and we must deal with the truth, that we chose not to see it.
The persecution of the Jewish people is relatable because humanity always seems to need a scapegoat. Whether for religious reasons, economic reasons or mostly, because we don’t want to take the responsibility on ourselves that what happens to us is directly related to our own choices and actions; humanity has always looked for someone to blame.
How do we stop it? Holmes and Watson find that the answer to that is not as simple as they might want to believe.

”The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols” by Nicholas Meyer. I enjoyed this book and plan on eventually reading the first one.

January 1905: Holmes and Watson are summoned by Holmes' brother Mycroft to undertake a clandestine investigation. An agent of the British Secret Service has been found floating in the Thames, carrying a manuscript smuggled into England at the cost of her life. The pages purport to be the minutes of a meeting of a secret group intent on nothing less than taking over the world.

Based on real events, the adventure takes the famed duo—in the company of a bewitching woman—aboard the Orient Express from Paris into the heart of Tsarist Russia, where Holmes and Watson attempt to trace the origins of this explosive document. On their heels are desperate men of unknown allegiance, determined to prevent them from achieving their task. And what they uncover is a conspiracy so vast as to challenge Sherlock Holmes as never before.

I found the story to be slow moving at first but I eventually got into it. Overall I enjoyed it and found it to be an intriguing read that I would recommend to Sherlock fans.

I requested and received an Advanced Readers Copy from St. Martins Press and NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

It's taken me several weeks to read this story. While I found it somewhat interesting, it just didn't grab me. It is not as compelling as I had hoped. For me, it was very slow.

It was fine, but didn’t grasp me like I hoped it would. I may reread it in the future when I haven’t been on a Holmes inspired reading binge.

“The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols” by Nicholas Meyer takes a novel approach to revisiting the classic stories of Sherlock Holmes as documented by Dr. John Watson. Meyer mixes a semblance of reality with an historic diary, an intellectual pursuit, and a scholarly task. The narrator is an academician specializing in Holmes, and he is overjoyed to be asked to examine a previously unknown diary by Watson.
Myer presents a diary written by “Watson,” in the typical conversational style that contains descriptions of the action, procedures, and conversations surrounding the main investigation as well as comments about the supporting events. There are lots of first person reflections as well. Readers are immediately immersed in the language, culture and atmosphere of the time and are transported to all the exotic places that typically define the adventures of Holmes and Watson. The familiar players are all present and accounted for, both friend and foe, as well as a few new ones, whom the narrator quickly identifies in his footnotes and comments on the diary. As always for Holmes and Watson, things are not as the first seem, and there is plenty of deception, deduction, and chasing clues.
I received a review copy of “The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols” from Nicholas Meyer, St Martin’s Press, and Minotaur Books. I have always enjoyed the original Holmes and Watson stories but have frequently been disappointed by modern interpretations that just miss the mark, however, not this time. The prose is authentic without being pretentious, the storyline is compelling, and the investigations along the way are typically Holmes. The use of the “found” diary allows new characters to be added to the mix without being hollow. I loved this interpretation. It is hard to beat the original, but this book comes close.

I got a chance to sit down the past week and read The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols. I loved it — no surprise there, but I did find it on par with The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Equally as entertaining and also as educational. Meyer's unique voice and talent at blending fiction with historical facts and real characters is masterful. I felt completely at home with the fascinating world he created and came out of it entertained and with new knowledge.

I loved Sherlock Holmes mysteries as a young reader and admit to really enjoying the various TV productions based on the characters. I didn’t however enjoy the Seven Percent Solution and perhaps that should have warned me off of this book by the same author, Nicholas Meyer. I am hard-pressed to explain what it is exactly about his version of Holmes and Watson that doesn’t work for me. I think it is because it feels as though he is poking fun at the characters rather than taking them seriously. That sense ruins the drama of the story. Other readers appear far happier about this case and I am in the minority. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Nicholas Meyer involves Holmes and Watson in an effort to debunk the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; They travel to Russia to get a confession that the protocols are bogus and an effort to incite violence against Jews. The Ockrana, the Russian secret service, are involved. The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols is the journal of Dr. Watson who chronicled the adventure.Well written.

Published by Minotaur Books on October 15, 2019

In 1905, just after Sherlock Holmes’ 50th birthday, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft gives him several pages copied from a document. The document is the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purported to discuss a Jewish plot to subvert Christendom. Russian scholars revealed the document’s fraudulent nature in the 1920s, well after the British government, via Mycroft, asked Sherlock to take a look at it.

The sister-in-law of Watson’s wife is fluent in French and Russian. She translates the document from French, observing its similarity to a document produced 30 years earlier. With the help of Sherlock’s deductive reasoning, they conclude that key differences in the two documents can be attributed to the original’s translation from French to Russian and back to French.

That should be enough to discredit the document, but Sherlock nonetheless sets off for Russia, Watson in tow, on a mission of ill-defined purpose. Sherlock apparently wants to find the document’s creator and induce a confession that the document is fraudulent.

Nicholas Meyer introduces actual people from history into his Sherlock novels (Freud most memorably in The Seven Percent Solution), and he does so here by making NAACP co-founder Anna Strunsky Walling a character. With Walling’s help, Sherlock finds the publisher of the Protocols, then gets himself into hot water that endangers Walling’s life. Such action as the novel offers unfolds near the end as Sherlock and Watson share a perilous moment with Anna on a funicular in Hungary.

Compared to The Seven Percent Solution, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocol is disappointing. The novel is constrained by history, so there is little that Sherlock can do to change the public perception that the Protocols were genuine. The novel’s greater disappointment lies in the absence of significant detection. Sherlock’s deductive skills, apart from an occasional “elementary” followed by an obvious observation, play almost no role in the story. The novel has the advantage of brevity; any longer and I would have condemned it as boring.

Perhaps Meyer wrote the novel to make a point about the dusty Protocols, a document that is occasionally resurrected by anti-Semites of the far right despite being discredited for nearly a century. If so, an essay would have done the job. As a Sherlock Holmes story, the novel falls flat. It is always good to see Sherlock and Watson and Meyer’s prose is lucid, but the lackluster story is unworthy of Conon Doyle’s iconic creation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

There are so many Sherlock or Sherlock-like novels out there that it can be hard to find one that is really exceptional or different. For me this was not one. I found the book was fine but nothing great. It did not grab me enough to want to read any of Meyer's other books in this series.

If you are looking for a quick read mystery this is a perfectly good one to pick up it just was not for me.

The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer is a Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson mystery. It was an extremely informative book in which I learned a tremendous amounts about the Zionists in the early 1900's. It is easy to forget how long the conflict over Israel has been going on and the political maneuvering it took to get it where it is today. Holmes and Watson traveled out of England, all the way to Russia to try to stop a rumor from spreading, which of course, was just as difficult then as it is now. What they found along the way was fascinating, from dangers on a train to the damage caused by pogroms in Russia. There were variations from the traditional Sherlock stories, including a second wife for Watson, Juliet; a possible sexual entanglement for Holmes (unheard of!); and Homes becoming emotionally entangled in a case.

While Meyer has written an enjoyable book, in my opinion, he has wandered too far of the reservation. The prose was cumbersome too often, and although the story was good, there were too many threads left hanging. I am a Homes aficionado and I enjoy reading other authors that have picked up the story and run with it, but I didn't warm to this one as much as I have to some of the others. Which is not to say it is not an interesting and intriguing book and worth a reader's time, if her is so inclined. I am not sorry I spent my time with it. I recommend it with slight reservations.

I received a free ARC of The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols from Netgalley. All opinions and interpretations contained herein are solely my own. #netgalley #theadventureofthepeculiarprotocols