Three stars is a combo of me not being in the mood and forcing it, and the book being not as good as I wanted it to be.
(six months later as I go to actually write this review)
No, I’m not even going to make excuses for this. It was very dull! The setting was dull. The mystery was dull. The interactions between Holmes and Mary were dull. Holmes was dull! And the resolution of the mystery did nothing for me. Returning to the setting of the best Holmes novel (but not the best Holmes story) could have been interesting, but it didn’t work out. Dartmoor on its own was not enough, and neither were the callbacks made throughout to The Hound of the Baskervilles.
I’m probably not going to continue the series for a while, maybe a couple of years. Want to give myself a break, and there are so many other books I really want to read.
I sort of feel bad that this review doesn’t meet the 250 word count limitation, but on the other hand, I have on multiple occasions written reviews between 3-5k words, so let’s just pull some from there and we’ll be good.