Review by Frank Plowright

Despite only appearing once, and then only in a short story, among Sherlock Holmes devotees Irene Adler from the short story ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ is a favourite. Among those devotees is SF and fantasy novelist Lavie Tidhar, and Adler is based around an alternate version of her. She’s not the only cast member who’ll nag at the brain cells as Tidhar surrounds her with a cast the literary might recognise in a steampunk world, including an orphan named Anne and several others from the Holmes canon.

We first meet Adler dressed in scarlet as a deceptive woman of action in the process of disabling an assassin. She’s seen through the eyes of Jane, a nurse who’s recently returned from the Boer conflict in South Africa having seen her fiance die there. She’s interesting and individual at first, but ends up dropping into the role of Watson to Adler’s Holmes, a comparison that would please none of the named characters.

Each of them is appealingly designed by Paul McCaffrey, allowing for the unreality of comics where every woman is impossibly beautiful. There are also grotesques, but nowhere near as many. He otherwise aims for realism, which leads to a slight stiffness affecting the figures, but he more than compensates with the effort put into surroundings, period details and decorations, and into creating the world for a pulp fiction extravaganza.

It’s all very silly, but enjoyable, even if Tidhar becomes too carried away with the game of involving yet another character from out of copyright fiction classics. The obviousness of this leads inevitably to comparisons with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Adler coming off second best by a considerable distance.