Gus and Otto Amlingmeyer – Old Red and Big Red – have pitched up in San Francisco, seeking to make their names as a sleuth and an author respectively. But city life is not something they are familiar with, even less so when they follow an old friend from their misadventures on the Southern Pacific Railroads.

Soon, however, their friend is found dead and the brothers, with their friend Diana Corvus, finding themselves hunting the mysterious “Black Dove”. But with both the police and the gangs of Chinatown on their trail, finding the identity of the Black Dove will only be the beginning of their problems…

This is the third of the Holmes On The Range series and the only one of the first five that I hadn’t reviewed on the blog before now. And there’s a reason for that – of the first five, it’s the one that I remember enjoying the least.

That’s a bit like saying vanilla is my least favourite ice cream flavour, though. I’ll eat it, I’ll enjoy it, but I’d prefer banana. Yumsk. Something, although I couldn’t exactly recall what, had meant that when I first read it, it hadn’t clicked.

Reading it again, what it was is that it isn’t much of a mystery. At least not a traditional clued one. It’s more of a caper, as Otto and Gustav travel the length and breadth of Chinatown, meet people, get into all sorts of scrapes, and bring things to a conclusion. There’s not an awful lot of detecting going on, but there’s a reason for that.

There are a couple of things that perhaps I didn’t appreciate the first time round. First of all, there are several times when there isn’t a lot of detecting in the Holmes canon, so, fair enough. The second thing is that I didn’t appreciate what was going on here.

Hockensmith is using this story to move some pieces into place. Primarily, he takes the story of the Black Dove to reveal some cracks in Old Red’s ornery façade, as we learn something of his past. Now I know that this leads into The Crack In The Lens, the next in the series, I realise what he was doing here. There’s also the cementing of Diana Corvus as a supporting character in the series, as Otto’s possible love interest and their definite partner in sleuthing.

All in all, I enjoyed this a lot more the second time round. I’d have preferred a little more deduction rather than being told a chunk of the solution at the death, but it’s always great to spend some time reading Otto’s words. And the excellent The Crack In The Lens comes next…