The Ghost Line

This is the first book in the new book series based on Elementary. In particular, it is written by one Adam Christopher, known to some of us as the editor of the latter issues of TSV.

A murder scene leads Holmes to the sewers under New York, and Watson to a gala event at the American Museum of Natural History. These events are more connected than you think, but expect more bodies before it's all wrapped up.

I don't want to say too much about the plot in case I give something away, so on to my opinions. I felt this book was too long. There is no way this could be a tv episode, and the book was taking full advantage of being a book and giving us more scenes. However... I didn't feel like a lot of the scenes really added to the story. Time and pages were taken because they could be taken, not because they needed to be taken. And with that we didn't get more insight into Holmes and Watson themselves like we might in an episode. (I have no idea if that was a restriction that Adam was under, not to develop history that might be later contradicted on the screen.)

That said, I definitely think he caught the characters well. I could picture Jonny Lee Millar and Lucy Liu delivering the lines as written. (It helped that i read this in the middle of a season, so I could easily hear their voices). They are captured perfectly. And there were many references I caught to other things, including Doctor Who because of course. And I'm sure there were many I missed. (I also kept thinking of Puma Man, but I doubt that was intentional.)

In short, characters yes, story no.

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