Another collection of variable quality, although the female characters in these stories are largely wonderful, and a handful are kickass, self-sufficient women.

Also, the canon support for a Holmes/Watson marriage is all over the place and nothing like subtle, but all in all there's relatively little of Watson in the book. He's narrating every page and he's present in all those scenes, but it seems like earlier books had more of him expressing his own self. The bits and pieces of them sniping at each other make me so fond because it's all too rare that we see that Watson is entirely able to hold his own next to Holmes, but he's self-censoring as narrator. Such interesting characterization. It makes him a great ninja of an unreliable narrator because ACD takes such pains to convince us that Watson is impeccably reliable. And yet... *g*

I wish he'd written more novels.