“The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases”, by Giles Milton

 

480 pages, Avery, ISBN-13: 978-1592406357

Lemme ask you somethin’: if you bought a book called The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases, wouldn’t you think it would be a work of fiction and have something to do with Sherlock Holmes? Well, sport, you’d be wrong, for Giles Milton’s book is, in fact, based on actual horrible crimes committed by real horrible monsters, with no mystery, romance or suspense to be found anywhere. That’s not to say that it’s a bad book; it’s just that it’s a book that follows several real-world detectives as they solve (or attempt to solve) several real-world crimes, most of them god-awful. The Murder Room pulls you in from the start and keeps your attention enough to keep wanting to read it (but there were times you’ll wish you hadn’t read about this murder or that one). Some stories will leave an indelible impression that will depress the hell out of you when you think about them afterwards. There’s your warning: if true crime is you thing then The Murder Room may just be for you.

All is not perfect, naturally: the writing style is rather disjointed, jumping from one case to another and then circling back again, a literary acrobatic act of writing that suffers from a lack of a cohesive narrative. As well, you may be frustrated to read that a case remained unsolved, lacked society support for full pursuit or met with resistance from the crime scene’s jurisdiction (this happens in the real world and is no fault of the author’s; it’s just depressing, is all). There are several worthy victories among the pages, but be prepared to deal with a lack of resolution in others (in particular, one case that snakes its way through the entire book is left at two very different suspects, one very certain profiler, a plan of action and...and that’s it. CSI, this ain’t). So don’t be fooled by the subtitle of The Murder Room, as the Baker Street detective is nowhere to be found; be prepared instead for a series of real-life murders that will alternately horrify and fascinate you, and that will stick with you, too, whether you want them to or not.