Book review: The Final Solution

A lonely German refugee boy has his parrot stolen, attracting the interest of a retired detective whose solitary life now largely consists of keeping bees. The parrot recites endless sequences of numbers in German, whose significance is initially unclear; are these numbers why the bird has been stolen?

Where Laurie King's Holmes is an older but still vigorous 60-something, Chabon's Holmes is in his 80s and has become a stately ruin whose knees creak, joints ache, and who mind occasionally blanks. But he can still read footprints and see through implausible cover stories, and Chabon takes us inside his head, inside his distress at his failings and his continuing drive to arrange clues into a pattern and solve mysteries. Holmes is difficult to use as a viewpoint character since his way of thinking is so strange; Chabon pulls it off really well. The mystery itself is pretty slight, and I'm puzzled that the eventual revelation is viewed as a surprise -- surely it's obvious what the numbers are? -- but it strikes a suitably sad note which sounds throughout the story.