Translated by Frances Riddle
Mulholland
Published February 10, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
It’s 1960 and Ormand Basil, an aging film star who is past his prime, is vacationing on a Greek Island when a violent storm out at sea cuts the small group of tourists off from the world. Soon, one of them is found hanging in a hut, apparently a suicide. But the woman’s companion is convinced her friend would not kill herself, and the actor, who most famously played Sherlock Holmes in a series of films years ago, notices discrepancies that point toward murder.
The police are unable to make it to the island, so the small group turns to Basil (as in Rathbone) to investigate. He quickly gains a Watson, a Catalan author of pulp fiction, both of them deeply familiar with the Holmes cannon, turning to it for inspiration. Perhaps to no reader’s surprise, the guests begin to fall dead as the pair tease out clues and consider possible suspects.
This is a clever bit of metafictional storytelling that deliberately plays with classic mystery tropes, with the conversations between Basil and his sidekick referring to many Sherlock Holmes stories, all unfolding within an Agatha Christie scenario. It may not work for those who simply want to read an old-school locked-room mystery and may find the playful literary elements a distraction from the story, or for those who are expecting a novel more like the author’s previous books. But mystery aficionados who enjoy pondering how crime fiction works on its readers will find the tongue-in-cheek interplay of the story with its antecedents quite a lot of clever fun.