Reading: The Angel of the Crows

Katherine Addison's The Angel of the Crows is, basically, Sherlock Holmes wingfic. Set in a world where humans live side by side with all manner of supernatural beings, it's narrated by Dr J.H. Doyle, a former Army surgeon invalided back home after a close encounter with a fallen angel in Afghanistan. Seeking a place to live that will be affordable on an Army pension, Doyle is introduced to Crow, an angel who is not fallen, but who nevertheless is not attached to a particular building as angels, in this world, normally are, and who is seeking someone to share lodgings in Baker Street. What follows is a rattle through various cases of the Holmes canon (principally A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Copper Beeches, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Speckled Band, though there are also elements of other stories mixed in) with added supernatural elements (the Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, is an actual hell-hound) but generally adhering fairly faithfully to the original plots. Running alongside this, Crow and Doyle find themselves drawn into the investigations surrounding some of the notorious real-life murders which took place at the same time as the Holmes stories were published - the Whitehall murders and the Thames torso murders.

I found the sections dealing with real-life murders rather gory, and I think I would have preferred if Addison had stuck to the Holmes reworking, which I liked a lot. Crow and Doyle's relationship seemed to me to sit somewhere between the original and the BBC Sherlock version, sometimes reminding me more of one, sometimes of the other (or, in the case of Sherlock, perhaps more of A.J. Hall's Sherlock fic), and I really enjoyed this take on it, as well as the supernatural worldbuilding. I'd definitely read more of this (surely there's more than enough Holmes canon for more?).