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    The Great Game: A Professor Moriarty Novel

    The Great Game: A Professor Moriarty Novel

    5.0 1

    by Michael Kurland


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    (First Edition)
    $7.99
    $7.99

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    Michael Kurland has written many nonfiction books on a vast array of topics, including How to Solve a Murder, as well as several novels. Twice a finalist for the Edgar Award (once for The Infernal Device), presented by the Mystery Writers of America, Kurland is perhaps best known for his novels about Professor Moriarty. He lives in Petaluma, California.


    Michael Kurland has written almost forty books. He was the editor of the Sherlock Holmes collection Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years. Twice a finalist for the Edgar Award, he lives in Petaluma, California.

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    Labeled the "Napoleon of Crime" by an obsessed Sherlock Holmes, Professor James Moriarty is a prominent scientist, a keen analytical mind, and a dabbler in less than savory doings. Two friends and former associates of Moriarty - Benjamin Barnett and his wife, the former Cecily Perrine - are travelling in Europe in early 1891 when they realize that they have become objects of scrutiny from persons unknown. Things turn deadly when they find themselves in the midst of an attempted assassination of a German prince. Meanwhile in Vienna, the younger son of a British nobleman - indulging in what was then known as "The Great Game" of amateur spying - finds himself framed for the murder of his paramour and the assassination of an Austrian Duke. In London, an unknown caller arrives at Moriarty's door on a matter of great urgency. But before Moriarty can be summoned to speak with him, the stranger is shot by a crossbow bolt loosed by unseen hands.

    While a lesser man might be daunted, Moriarty is merely intrigued and begins to investigate. What Moriarty uncovers is a cabal that seems to be using assassination to destabilize the rule of the crowned heads of Europe. But he also senses that there is something even bigger than this operating - a conspiracy behind the conspiracy - and detects the workings of a mind quite possibly as clever as his own. Using his contacts, friends, and the not-so-desired help of his often nemesis Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty must save his friends and outwit his most cunning opponent while the fate of history hangs in the balance.

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    Publishers Weekly
    In this deliciously complex and abundantly rewarding novel from the author of The Infernal Device (a novella collection featuring Moriarty), Europe in the 1890s is on the brink of political cataclysm. Well before the Nazis, an Aryan brotherhood is bent on toppling Europe's major governments. Meanwhile, on the Continent, a loose group of young English aristocrats uses the privileges of class to gain entry to royal courts and the uppermost echelons of power. Without official imprimatur, they begin "the Great Game," a nascent counter-intelligence movement. Disconnected information prompts Professor James Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes, separately, to depart England and hasten to Vienna. That such material entertains for page after page is a tribute to Kurland's remarkable talent. Multiple plots leapfrog across chapters in perfect pace. Surprises abound. The characters whether European nobles, Americans abroad, anarchists plotting the new world order or a scene-stealing dwarf are richly and convincingly portrayed. Dialogue sparkle with wit, erudition and unerring diction. The dwarf's cockney slang holds especial delights. This is no ordinary Holmes pastiche. Indeed, the Great Detective has little more than a cameo. Fans already acquainted with the author's brilliantly reconceived Moriarty, who is as much an advance over Conan Doyle's "Napoleon of Crime" as Shakespeare's Hamlet is over the historical Danish prince, likely pre-ordered this first full-length novel in the series as soon as they caught wind of it. Uncommon are the pleasures such writing affords. (Aug. 13) Forecast: The Holmes pastiche label will be a turn-off for some, but the author's high reputation (The Infernal Device, as wellas a novel, A Plague of Spies, have been Edgar award finalists) should ensure sales far beyond those of the average Holmes spinoff. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
    Kirkus Reviews
    Despite the slanderous imprecations of Sherlock Holmes, who shares an amusing prologue with him, Professor James Moriarty not only isn't "the Napoleon of modern crime," he's an eminent mathematician who's available for a delicate diplomatic mission to 1891 Vienna. Moriarty's charge is to rescue the son of the Duke of Albermar, who's gone undercover as "Paul Donzhof" to infiltrate the Secret Society for Freedom, when he's arrested and accused of murdering his mistress and assassinating a titled cousin of Emperor Franz Joseph. And while Moriarty is in Vienna anyway, one of his confederates tells him, he might as well rescue a pair of his friends who have been imprisoned by Graf Sigfried von Linsz because he suspects they know too much about a nefarious plot his own friends are hatching. Since von Linsz has also kidnapped an American cousin of Holmes's, the great adversaries will meet as allies in an attempt to free their intimates, foil an unlikely coalition of anarchists (interesting idea, that), and take turns with the rest of the cast-all disguised under layers of false identities to spy on each other-in dazzling impressionable audiences like Dr. Watson with parlor-trick inferences. But both Moriarty and his nemesis are outdone by real-life criminologist Dr. Hanns Gross, who describes and attributes Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex ten years ahead of his source. Kurland (The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes, 1998, etc.) provides foolish period entertainment that, unlike even its most minor characters, means no harm in the world.

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