alt.sherlock.holmes Books in Order

Gini Koch's entry in the alt.sherlock.holmes world takes the familiar Holmes setup and drops it somewhere much shinier and grimier than Baker Street. A Study in Starlets follows Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson in modern Los Angeles, where celebrity culture, low-rent sleaze, and television production create a very different kind of fog. The detective work is still there. It is just wrapped in reality-TV ego, publicists, missing money, and people who are very good at performing innocence.

That shift is most of the fun.

Holmes is still the sharpest mind in the room, but this version is not a Victorian gentleman with a violin and a coal fire nearby. She is a consulting detective working a city built on image. Watson is her new partner and roommate, which gives the story the same basic relationship engine that Sherlock readers want, admiration, friction, confusion, and loyalty, but in a much more contemporary setting. Koch clearly enjoys the collision between classic detective logic and modern media nonsense.

The novella begins with Irene Adler, here reworked as a notorious reality starlet, asking Holmes for help with an embarrassing theft. Before long, that case overlaps with another one involving missing television producer Cliff Camden and a deeply unappealing circle of entertainment-industry players. The LAPD are not especially interested, the clients are messy, and the people around the production are hiding more than one thing. That means Holmes and Watson get to do what they do best, notice details everyone else dismisses and keep pushing after the point when normal people would back away.

The atmosphere matters here as much as the puzzle does. Los Angeles is not just background decoration. In this story it is a city of crews, trailers, favors, gossip, nerves, and manufactured personalities. Koch uses that well. The result feels less like a traditional locked-room mystery and more like a smart, fast-moving detective story about what happens when performance and truth start leaning on each other.

It is still recognizably Holmes.

Readers who want strict canon imitation may prefer a more traditional pastiche, but that is not really the job this story is trying to do. This is a remix. It keeps the central detective partnership, the observational brilliance, the Adler connection, and the pleasure of watching a mystery snap into place, while changing the era, the gender balance, and the social world around the case.

So if you are coming to this page wondering what to expect, expect a brisk modern Sherlock story with Hollywood grime, strong banter, and a case that gets darker as it goes. A Study in Starlets works well for readers who like Holmes variations that actually vary, not just in costume, but in setting, tone, and the kind of people the detective has to peel apart.