Kavalier & Holmes

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has written a Sherlock Holmes adventure. From Christianity Today:

But if The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay pitted popular arts against political action, The Final Solution, though more concise, aims at something greater. Chabon pays his dues to the mystery genre, but he is also concerned with mystery itself, and the meanings that we project against it. The book takes place in England in 1943, where we find the elderly Holmes cultivating honey bees in the bucolic Sussex countryside. His idyll is disturbed when he observes a boy walking along the railroad tracks on the perimeter of his property with an African parrot perched on his shoulder. Because Holmes fears that the boy may electrocute himself on the third rail, he races from his house to intercede, but he fails to elicit an answer from the boy. We soon learn that young Linus Steinman is a Jewish orphan recently placed with an English family, the parrot his only connection to the past. The trauma that Linus has undergone has seemingly rendered him mute, but the parrot speaks in his stead, voicing endless German lieder and, more provocatively, strings of numbers.