The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase
How many times have you wanted a new life? Would you exchange yours for someone else's? These are the questions faced by Damien March in the opening pages of Marcel Theroux'sConfessions of Mycroft Holmes. After his uncle Patrick's death, Damien learns that he has inherited a ramshackle property on the isolated island of Ionia, off the coast of Cape Cod. Should he abandon his life in London--and his career as a BBC journalist--and head west? That he does. But once he reaches the house, he's confronted with decades' worth of collected junk, which Patrick's will explicitly prevents him from discarding.Damien also meets a number of characters on the island, all of them part of his late uncle's life. One of these acquaintances unknowingly delivers to him an unfinished manuscript that Patrick was writing about Sherlock Holmes's brother, Mycroft. The story arouses Damien's suspicions about his uncle's black-sheep existence. Ultimately, though, it leads him to discover the truth about his own family--and himself. His sudden plunge into the hard facts brings to mind "that moment suspended between the rock and the ocean when you bunch your knees up and anticipate the cold shock of the water." And by the end of the novel, Damien is enlightened: his search has answered questions he did not even know to ask.--Elizabeth Potter