The Murder of Mary Russell by Laurie E. King

Then with an appalling, wet convulsion, the old man went limp.  As Clarissa bent over her father, infant wails mingled with the keening sounds of her own abandonment.
--Laurie E. King, The Murder of Mary Russell (Bantam 2016)

I generally avoid pastiches of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (the useful website about mysteries, http://www.stopyourekillingme.com has 23 authors of Sherlock Holmes books listed) --they usually suffer from too little or too much imagination -- but a friend recommended King's books to me as being of fairly high quality. The first few, beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994, are intelligent novels about Holmes's retirement years and his eventual marriage to scholar Mary Russell.  In the later books (King has written thirteen so far) Holmes is sometimes barely seen and King concentrates on the role of Mary and women in post-Victorian England.  The Murder of Mary Russell was suggested by Doyle's story "The Gloria Scott" published in Strand Magazine in 1893.  In that story a man survives a shipwreck and becomes a blackmailer.  The blackmailer's last name is Hudson, the last name of Holmes's housekeeper, though no relationship is suggested in Doyle's story.  In King's book this Hudson is Mrs. Hudson's father and the novel is mostly an extended flashback to Mrs. Hudson's childhood in Australia, her life of petty crime and her illegitimate son.  Eventually Holmes finds Clarissa Hudson while hunting for her father and hires her as his housekeeper while her son stays in Australia with Clarissa's sister; there are some interesting class-conscious parallels with Samuel Richardson's 18th C, novel Clarissa.

There is an unusual amount of bloodshed in this book, mostly revealed in its aftermath. Also, like too many mystery writers, King often misleads and manipulates her readers; I presume, since it is so common, that readers like this.  Generally I prefer genre writers such as John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, who write in the first person, the reader learning about events as the narrator does. King's novel of mostly flashback is similar to Doyle's novels --especially The Valley of Fear(1914) -- and we get only a glimpse of the young Sherlock Holmes, when he rescues Clarissa from her father; he appears mostly, in King's novels, after the period that Watson writes about and the emphasis is more on his emotions than his ratiocination.