An addition to the Sherlock Holms and Marry Russell series, which I got addicted to after reading the first one.
This tale is a lighter-hearted adventure than most, as an English film company plans a film loosely based on the Pirates of Penzance. Mycroft's hand in the background becomes evident before long, and Mary is shanghaied to help investigate certain shady characters.
It's a farce, and the author tells us that before very many paragraphs. Still, it's a lot of fun.
Don't be fooled by the cover blurb, there's no terror and no suspense. After the serious events of the last two books, King takes a more light-hearted tone. It's rather silly and meant to be so. I liked Pessoa; after a couple paragraphs I thought "this has to be a real person", and indeed King has a page or so about him in the back of the book. But the farce gets too thick; the sheer number of actors make it hard to care about any of them, and then there's Edith - c'mon, why was Edith necessary? The reason Mary was there in the first place is pretty convoluted, how Sherlock catches up with her even more so, and the ending not very satisfactory. But on the plus side, it's got some nice imagery of Lisbon, descriptions of sailing, and you get to hum various bits from Pirates of Penzance while you're reading.
