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bibliogrammaMercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters series is not one of my favourites. I’ve read a few of the books in the series, and enjoyed them, and bounced rather hard off some others. And there have been some that, based on the brief publisher’s descriptions, just didn’t interest me. However, the 11th novel in the series, A Study in Sable, caught my attention because it involves Sherlock Holmes, and John and Mary Watson, both of whom, in this universe, are Elemental magicians - and have had to keep their activities more or less secret from Holmes, who is, of course, a sceptic. It’s rather fun watching Holmes becoming slowly convinced that there are, in fact,some powers and abilities he knows nothing of, and slowly come to see how they may be useful to his investigations.
A Study in Sable also involves three other main characters, Sarah, a gifted medium, her friend and partner Nan, a telepath and psychometrician, and their ward, the child Suki who is a former street urchin, and, like Nan, a telepath.
In this tale, a case that intrigues Holmes, one that involves a young woman who apparently ran off to Canada with her lover, intersects with a case that Sarah is hired to deal with, the haunting of a melodramatic opera singer who, coincidentally, is the sister of the missing girl who is the focus of Holmes’ attention.
The main plot is quite interesting, and offers some surprising twists on its way to a satisfying conclusion. However, I found the novel somewhat marred by a few self-contained incidents that added nothing to the unravelling of the main plot, and seemed to serve solely to show Watson and his wife working in concert with Sarah, Nan, other magic holders - and other creatures not human.
The 12th installment of the series, A Scandal in Battersea, brings Sarah and Nan together with Holmes again. This time, the threat to England is first revealed in the terrifying dreams of a young woman of good family being cared for in a genteel home for the insane. When John and Mary Watson, along with Nan and Sarah, do their standard Christmas duty of visiting the madhouses to see if any of the poor souls are actually psychics or potential magicians put away because of the strangeness of their perceptions, they discover that young Amelia is a clairvoyant, and that her visions are of a horrendous being from another universe that is preparing to break through into our own. Though they cannot discover who is the human magician working to bring the monster through the gate, they soon realise that he is kidnapping other young women as sacrifices - some disappear altogether, others are found, with their minds empty and their souls beyond even the reach of Sarah’s mediumistic talents. Calling on all their allies, they race against time to prepare for the breakthrough of the creature before all is lost.
There are very strong Lovecraftian overtones to this story, from the somewhat mediocre magician lured into following the rituals in a mysterious book, to the other-dimensional nature of the monster and its mostly glimpsed, never fully described nature.
These are not my most favourite enlargement to the vast corpus of Holmes-insired work, but they are still quite enjoyable on their own merits - indeed, they would work as well with some other intelligent but otherwise ordinary human being in the roles that Holmes portrays. But it wouldn’t be quite as much fun, I suppose.
A Study in Sable also involves three other main characters, Sarah, a gifted medium, her friend and partner Nan, a telepath and psychometrician, and their ward, the child Suki who is a former street urchin, and, like Nan, a telepath.
In this tale, a case that intrigues Holmes, one that involves a young woman who apparently ran off to Canada with her lover, intersects with a case that Sarah is hired to deal with, the haunting of a melodramatic opera singer who, coincidentally, is the sister of the missing girl who is the focus of Holmes’ attention.
The main plot is quite interesting, and offers some surprising twists on its way to a satisfying conclusion. However, I found the novel somewhat marred by a few self-contained incidents that added nothing to the unravelling of the main plot, and seemed to serve solely to show Watson and his wife working in concert with Sarah, Nan, other magic holders - and other creatures not human.
The 12th installment of the series, A Scandal in Battersea, brings Sarah and Nan together with Holmes again. This time, the threat to England is first revealed in the terrifying dreams of a young woman of good family being cared for in a genteel home for the insane. When John and Mary Watson, along with Nan and Sarah, do their standard Christmas duty of visiting the madhouses to see if any of the poor souls are actually psychics or potential magicians put away because of the strangeness of their perceptions, they discover that young Amelia is a clairvoyant, and that her visions are of a horrendous being from another universe that is preparing to break through into our own. Though they cannot discover who is the human magician working to bring the monster through the gate, they soon realise that he is kidnapping other young women as sacrifices - some disappear altogether, others are found, with their minds empty and their souls beyond even the reach of Sarah’s mediumistic talents. Calling on all their allies, they race against time to prepare for the breakthrough of the creature before all is lost.
There are very strong Lovecraftian overtones to this story, from the somewhat mediocre magician lured into following the rituals in a mysterious book, to the other-dimensional nature of the monster and its mostly glimpsed, never fully described nature.
These are not my most favourite enlargement to the vast corpus of Holmes-insired work, but they are still quite enjoyable on their own merits - indeed, they would work as well with some other intelligent but otherwise ordinary human being in the roles that Holmes portrays. But it wouldn’t be quite as much fun, I suppose.