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Rating: 
Summary: Train To Nowhere
Review: Compared with a genre classic like Mark Frost's 'The List Of Seven' this, the third Mycroft Holmes novel scores for being almost entirely incident, plot and suspense free. Instead 'The Flying Scotsman' limps along using the killer-on-a-train scenario until the reader snores. The authors (Quinn Fawcett is a pseudonym for two writers combining) might as well be writing about my mother's shopping list. Avoid.
Rating:
Summary: Train To Nowhere
Review: Compared with a genre classic like Mark Frost's 'The List Of Seven' this, the third Mycroft Holmes novel scores for being almost entirely incident, plot and suspense free. Instead 'The Flying Scotsman' limps along using the killer-on-a-train scenario until the reader snores. The authors (Quinn Fawcett is a pseudonym for two writers combining) might as well be writing about my mother's shopping list. Avoid.
Rating: 
Summary: Trust Mr. Cokers Review
Review: I just want to reinforce the value of Rory Coker's review. This is one of the only books in my life which I have stopped reading IN THE MIDDLE. Thats how bad it is. The situations are preposterous, and, to true Holmes fans, the character of Mycroft is nothing like the all knowing, all powerful, but never moving figure from the Canon. Avoid at all costs - life's too short!!
Rating:
Summary: Trust Mr. Cokers Review
Review: I just want to reinforce the value of Rory Coker's review. This is one of the only books in my life which I have stopped reading IN THE MIDDLE. Thats how bad it is. The situations are preposterous, and, to true Holmes fans, the character of Mycroft is nothing like the all knowing, all powerful, but never moving figure from the Canon. Avoid at all costs - life's too short!!
Rating:
Summary: Painfully bad
Review: This seems to be the fourth in a series about someone called Mycroft Holmes (but having no real relation to the character created by Conan Doyle) as "edited" by Quinn Fawcett and as told by Mycroft's colorless assistant Guthrie. It is the only book in the series I have read and will certainly forevermore remain the one and only. Had I the inductive skills of Conan Doyle's Sherlock and Mycroft, I would have put the book back on the bookstore shelves as soon as I noticed that all the reviewers' blurbs on the flyleaf and back cover are from publications of the Western East Podunk Grain and Corn Bulletin sort.Well, what we have is an almost completely plotless 320 pages, in which the author carefully describes every scrap of food and sip of liquid that goes into Mycoft's mouth, but never finds time to create characters, situations or developments that would be of any interest to the long-suffering reader. The books most similar to this one that I have seen are the Irene Adler novels of Carol Nelson Douglas, in which there are 50 pages of descriptions of Irene's outfits for every paragraph in which Irene wonders idly who killed the little Paris seamstress about 200 pages back, and why. Mycroft himself seems to have no real job, and spends his time eating, fretting in a distant, avuncular way, and sending and receiving telegrams which never amount to anything. In this particular novel, someone of questionable judgement has chosen Mycroft to organize getting the friendly Scandinavian Prince Oscar safely out of England, before an international incident is created by having him assassinated on English soil. The novel takes place in a completely imaginary and relentlessly superficial world, connected in no way to the sociopolitical realities of 1890. Instead, we have two gigantic, global and preposterously efficient forces for evil, the Brotherhood and the Golden Lodge. Unlike vaguely similar organizations in our real world, whose members have trouble finding their shoes, pistols and computers in the morning, the organizations Mycroft faces here are always 30 steps ahead of him, even when he has only just decided what to do. Thus he and his two aides, Guthrie and Tyers, are always reacting, never acting. Not that much happens that they need to react to, as there is virtually no action. I got the feeling that the book is a first draft, and that the author never had time to go back and decide what to do with certain sequences. For example, there is an interminable early chapter in which Mycroft gets Chief Inspector Somerford drunk over dinner, and questions him apparently to some point, but no point ever develops and the Inspector in fact never appears in the novel again! On the Flying Scotsman, Mycroft identifies a passenger as being crudely disguised to appear to be a printer, though there would be absolutely no point to such an impersonation, but later the passenger is (correctly) found to be a bookie, and the ink and chalk stains Mycroft referred to earlier are not part of a disguise, but rather the normal appearance of a bookie who has boarded the train in haste without time to clean up. Or, again, the assassin aboard the train is the one person who could not possibly be the assassin, and the only murder he does commit has no point and is never explained. In fact, the novel ends as if the author had simply reached the proper page count. It is fair to say that 80% of the questions raised during the novel's course, uninteresting as they may be, are not answered, or even brought up again. They are just there to expend ink and pages. So I wouldn't advise expending your hard-earned funds in this particular case.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Read
Review: Unlike many who have "reviewed" this book prior - this is NOT a Sherlock Holmes novel. It is, however, a great piece of work, painstakingly documenting period England and quite entertaining. Shame so many think because Mycroft appears so stodgy and sedentary in the canon that there can't be more than meets the eye. I daresay someone described as Mycroft is by Holmes and Watson wouldn't remain in a high government position long! It's also clear they weren't close. So let it go. Enjoy the read!
Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: Unlike many who have "reviewed" this book prior - this is NOT a Sherlock Holmes novel. It is, however, a great piece of work, painstakingly documenting period England and quite entertaining. Shame so many think because Mycroft appears so stodgy and sedentary in the canon that there can't be more than meets the eye. I daresay someone described as Mycroft is by Holmes and Watson wouldn't remain in a high government position long! It's also clear they weren't close. So let it go. Enjoy the read!
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