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Title: The Flying Scotsman

Subtitle: A Mycroft Holmes Novel, Book 3

Author: Quinn Fawcett

Narrator: Alan Stanford

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-24-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 26 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

To keep the peace after an attempted assassination, a prince must be smuggled out of England aboard the Flying Scotsman, the fastest train between London and Edinburgh. Disguised as journalists, Mycroft and Patterson Guthrie, guard the prince. Also aboard is Pauline Gatspy. Is she on Mycroft's side? Or is the Prince her latest target?

Members Reviews:

A good story, let down by the American vocabulary.

Located in the United Kingdom, and told in the first person by a Scottish character, this thriller is badly let down by the repeated use of American vocables; this especially jarring when it comes to railway terminology:

Just for a sample, in Britain; trains have drivers and guards, not engineers and conductors, while engines have tenders and not colliers.

In short, the book needs being translated into English.

Painfully bad

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.