[ATDrake]

Finished A Study in Sable by Mercedes Lackey which, judging by its position on the library's New Books shelf, is the latest in her Elemental Masters series of Victorian urban fantasy with fairy tale-based plot elements. Over the course of the series, Lackey has been inserting thinly-veiled pastiches of genre-iconic characters (there was a recent one that was all about the Lord Peter Wimsey expy), and as the title of this installment implies, this is the one that outright uses Sherlock Holmes (by name, since he's mostly public domain in most places now), also recasting John and Mary Watson as Masters of Water and Air.

Quite frankly, the Watsons came across as kind of generic magic people who could have been given any names and served the same plot function, without providing all that much that was distinctive about them from the ACD tales (or at least Dr. Watson, given that he's had a bunch of wives and only one of them got serious screentime, IIRC). But Holmes was mostly himself, even if I found his depiction overly excuses-making determinedly skeptical about the existence of magic in a demonstrably magical world in the face of examinable evidence. ACD Holmes didn't care about whether the earth revolved around the sun or otherwise, but paid attention to anything that was germane to his crime-solving, and I personally think that would carry over in him not really caring about having a "rational" cause for the various supernatural phenomena so much as repeatably observable results. But that's a minor quibble in a story I otherwise mostly liked.

The bulk of the story centred around Nan and Sarah, two of Lackey's past child characters now grown up, coming into contact with the Watsons for reasons, which lead them to encounter Holmes and help him out with a mundane-looking missing persons case, which coincidentally becomes one of their cases from the supernatural side, as one of the parties involved claims to be haunted by restless ghosts, and independently contacts Sarah, whose mediumistic abilities can contact and send on to the afterlife. In between, there's some errand-running which shows off the Watsons' magical abilities and does some namedropping for Holmes' cases. And it does feel like namedropping, since there wasn't all that much plot usage to those bits except for incorporating some Holmesiana mythos by showing off the girls' abilities to impress Holmes and confirm some of his suspicions regarding his rogues' gallery.

Aside from that, the story overall was actually more enjoyable than the past few Elemental Masters volumes that I've read. Lackey does continue her tendency to unhelpfully infodump by going on about the plucky protagonists' super special abilities and training and how awesome they all are, before actually showing them in action, which IMHO kind of undercuts the effect. But this installment was refreshingly lacking in her typical villainous gloating self-justifying rant internal monologue, probably because the actual villain was meant to be a surprise (which I guessed the whodunnit, but not the how/why, mainly because I already knew the particular folk ballad she based the A-plot of this one upon from her Free Bards novels) and there were some red herrings dropped about a possible culprit who turned out to be something entirely different.

Medium-mild recommend if you've liked previous volumes in the series, or just want to read another take on Sherlock Holmes in a domestically cozy fantasy world. This one didn't feel too continuity heavy (I think I skipped a couple of books, since there were a bunch of references to characters and previous incidents I didn't recall as though I were expected to remember them, and the infodumpiness actually didn't help with that, but it was easy enough to gloss over those parts and they felt like repeated character backstory-filler rather than important development bits) and the multiple intersecting plotlines were self-contained and easy to follow, so even though it continues certain characters' stories, I think this one can pretty much be read standalone, as many of the Elemental Masters books are meant to be.