Holmes and Watson

An American Adventure

By: David Ruffle

Narrated by: Dan Miller

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. Or did she? Holmes and Watson, while in America find themselves face to face with Lizzie Borden when two fresh axe murders rock Fall River society. Is Lizzie to blame?

©2015 David Ruffle (P)2021 MX Publishing

Sherlock Holmes in America

Interesting story that connects Holmes to the Lizzie Borden murders, as well as additional murders. Performance was good.

Slap Dash Performance Detracts from Fine Tale

The recording contains blatant editing faux pas and numerous errors in pronunciation on even relatively common words. Fragments or entire sentences were repeated without editing. The reader's voice is engaging, though somewhat sing-song and sometimes an ill fit for the material, bur the editing and pronunciation errors are inexcusable.

The performance/ production issues make or hard to judge the story itself objectively, but it held my interest and entertained me in the end.

A really good story!

This was a treat, Sherlock Holmes and Lizzie Borden! *laughs*

That combo aside, I enjoyed a lot the writing, the perfectly painting of the Victorian Era and, as much I like Holmes and Watson in their London, it was interesting to see them in this new location.

There are many quotes from the famous trial, which I appreciated, and interesting secondary characters that help the narrative. And the portrait of Lizzie Borden is chilling, as it should be.

A fantastic story.

Good Story, Subpar Narration

This was a good Sherlock and Watson story that shows our heroes having an adventure in New York for a change. The mystery was good and a nice change of pace from the typical London Holmes story.

The narration left a bit to be desired, however. There were multiple instances of words being mispronounced, even more common-place words, and times when the author would make a mistake and start over. At first, I thought my copy of the audiobook was bad and it was skipping or something, but when it kept happening and the other narration mistakes happened, I realized it was just the narration. The narrator also used almost the same voice and pacing for all of the characters, making it very difficult to keep track of which character was speaking at any given time.

Overall, it was a good story, but I'd recommend picking up the book until the narration is improved.

Where’s New York

Sherlock Holmes has been hired by the New York City Police Department to teach their Detectives his techniques of investigation. As with all professional police at the time, they had their own opinions on guilt and who did it. He travels out to Fall Rivers , were a series of murders have a unique signature.