Best Book Read in 2014

In thinking about the books I have read since September, I really had a hard time narrowing down my favorite book, or the book I think everyone should read someday. I think I have to narrow it down to The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz. Many of you may recognize his name, mainly because he is the author of the fast-paced Alex Rider series (Stormbreaker, Eagle Strike, Point Blank, etc.). I have been into mysteries lately, and I was looking for a novel that was not in the genre of "Young Adult". I saw this author's name come up on a new book search, and I was intrigued-- I had no idea he also wrote for adults. Upon further reading about him on Goodreads, I noticed that the novel House of Silk is the first Sherlock Holmes novel commissioned by Arthur Conan Doyle's estate (he's the guy who wrote all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries). So it had to be good, right? Well, it was.

The main story in the novel is an art dealer, Edmund Carstairs, comes to Sherlock Holmes for his help to ferret out a criminal who seems to have followed him all the way from America, where he was doing business. What seems to be an easy case of revenge, actually twists and turns from poisoning, to murder, to well... something really hideous-- a dirty little secret of the House of Silk. So much happens, and there are so many twists and turns, it's truly hard to summarize the novel very easily.

I think I was hooked immediately by the language and word choice of the author, Anthony Horowitz. He had a way of writing that was full of imagery, I could see everything in my head, without it being overly wordy or hard to follow. I liked that characters like Sherlock's brother, Mycroft, made appearances in the novel, especially because it reminded me of the BBC show Sherlock, and I really liked how Horowitz was able to weave in some details from the life of Sherlock Holmes that would only be apparent to real Sherlock Holmes fans, such as Sherlock's opium addiction. The novel and the writing brought so many images to my mind from movies, tv shows and short stories dealing with Sherlock Holmes.

fence-post.deviantart.com

An image or an idea that will stick with me for a long time, and that makes me want to get other Sherlock Holmes and mystery fans to read this book, is the way the plot twists and turns, bringing characters together in ways that I truly couldn't see coming. The art dealer, Edmund Carstairs, has an affiliation with one of the young orphan street boys Holmes employs and is later murdered. The American woman Carstairs marries is not exactly who she purports to be. The criminal from Boston, with whom Carstairs is involved in the murder of his twin, is here for reasons I could never see coming-- even after he is murdered in London. It truly kept me thinking and connecting characters and plot pieces.