This book certainly has an interesting premise: what if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective Sherlock Holmes took up the fight against the Cthulhoid terrors found in the work of H.P. Lovecraft? Unfortunately, this idea often sounds better on paper than it does in execution. I think the main problem is that reconciling the archly-rational Holmes to the sanity-blasting horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos is not an easy task. A handful of the authors who contributed short fiction to this collection get it, but many fall short in terms of tone and believability. (However, Watson’s time in Afghanistan lends itself particularly well to the setting of Lovecraft’s weird tales; so much so, in fact, that it becomes the focus of a significant number of the stories in this anthology.) All in all, Shadows Over Baker Street contains some stellar pieces and some rather poor ones as well. Either way, fans of both Sherlock Holmes and the Great Old Ones will feel compelled to pick this up. The stars are right, after all.

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