Titan Books "New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" series (apparently so named, although not on their distinctively foggy covers) sucked me in with Mark Latham's excellent book "The Red Tower", and I"ve been reading the series with little success. "The Devil's Dust" is by James Lovegrove, and it's better than most of this series - although with some extreme reservations.

The problem for me is the books in this series are mostly well written to a point about three quarters the way through where they become trite - this turning point being when they fully engage with whatever highly un-Sherlockian conceit the plot has been saddled with: Frankenstein, for instance. "The Devil's Dust" has a similar structure, but it is saved by the conceit being more grounded in Holmes' world than usual: Sherlock and Watson meet, spar and sleuth alongside H Rider Haggard's character Alan Quartermain of "King Solomon's Mines" fame.

It's not a terrible pairing, and the forays into magic, visions and alternative philosophies are held nicely to account by Holmes while still being an entirely plausible alternative to his scientific perspective - it's quite well handled without sacrificing Holmes and Watson's characters nor belittling Quatermain's world.

However Quartermain still derails what could have been a neat mystery - brought to them by Mrs Hudson no less, so promisingly novel a start! Worse than this, situations are resolved with gunfire rather than brains - except when Holmes weaponises both racism and body shaming to defeat a foe. 

Unfortunately bringing Quartermain into the mix brings weighty issues of racism, colonialism and cultural appropriation, and the literary shortfalls of the White Saviour amongst Noble Savages - and instead of avoiding these the author tries to make clever use of them. To be fair James Lovegrove mostly succeeds at this, but it's no less of a mistake for being successful - it's often pretty distasteful.

In the end this feels like another potentially great Holmes plot with quality writing wasted for a central conceit that just doesn't work with the character.