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Look, Katie and Elliott may read only great American classics, but I'm not gonna lie - I read a detective novel every now and again. And I love it. This is the third in a series that imagines what would happen if a retired Sherlock Holmes took as his apprentice a brilliant but troubled young woman he met on the Sussex Downs.

Incidentally, I tried to read a novel of suspense with more of a literary pedigree - I tried The Lemur by Benjamin Black - who is also known as John Banville, author of The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. But The Lemur's premise happened to be the same as that of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: an aging journalist hires a young misfit researcher to help him write the biography of an old, wealthy man who has secrets in his past. Benjamin Black did so much less with the idea than Larsson had (in what was, admittedly, one of the best books I read in 2009) that I just couldn't work up the will to finish this (very short) novel. A Letter of Mary was much more satisfying.