" This is the 4th book in a series known as "Holmes on the Range", featuring two cowboy brothers, Otto "Big Red" and Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer. I enjoyed the first two a lot (Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track) the third (The Black Dove) not as much, and with this one I am having trouble deciding whether I liked it or not. What I do like about this series is the characters of Otto and Gustav and the settings in the Old West cowboy days. Gustav is illiterate, but his brother Otto reads to him the stories of Sherlock Holmes. It is implied that Holmes was a real person, and not just a fictional character. Gustav is a perceptive person, and gets the idea in his head that he can solve mysteries in the way that Holmes did - through observation and thinking. In this story, Gustav wants to solve the murder of a woman he had fallen in love with 5 years before, but begins to doubt his ability to do it in a Holmes manner - thus the "crack in the lens" of investigation. The story is narrated from the viewpoint of Otto, and he has some droll ways of looking at things and spouts some entertaining metaphors.
I guess what bothered me most about this story was the focus on the role of prostitutes in the Old West days and the fact that Gustav accepted that the woman he loved, a prostitute, continued to "serve" customers, even though it was something she was enslaved to and may not have been her choice of lifestyle to continue, given a way out of it. The other disturbing thing was the butchering of some women in the manner of Jack the Ripper - a pretty gruesome topic! Throw in some despicable brothel owners, a fanatic religious element, and many carousing cowboys, and the whole setting is far from uplifting. I'd like to see the Amlingmeyer brothers get back to some on-the-range activities, should Steve Hockensmith continue this series. "
— Sally, 2/18/2014