Sherlock is meant to be smart and Moriarty even more so, and yet these are two of the most unintelligent protagonists I've ever encountered. Introducing Sherlock as a mastermind of bizarre chemistry experiments and Moriarty as having an eidetic memory does not make them clever.

There are so many dropped plot threads that could have fleshed out this lackluster story -- the engimatic Mycroft, Sherlock's sickly mother whom you never actually get to meet, Mori's mother, and so on.

I was excited to read about a Moriarty who outsmarts Sherlock and becomes his evil nemesis, but what I got instead was a whiny teenager who suddenly realizes that she is running out of pages to have any actual character development, so it must be time to suddenly plan a murder. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work.