His Last Bow is written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish author and creator of Sherlock Holmes. His Last Bow is in fact a collection of adventures experienced by Holmes told from the perspective of his assistant, Dr. Watson. The book, or a collection of books, was published in 1917 in Great Britain and it can definitely be noticed by the reader. The language was, in my opinion, hard and heavy to read. It felt like it had a weight on it but I guess that it is just a regular experience for a foreigner like me to read 100-year-old British English for a first time. Some words and clauses looked like totally alien to me and were obviously old but after a couple of pages I got used to it so I wouldn’t really consider it as a flaw. It’s all important part of the history after all.
The book consists of 8 chapters. Each chapters works as a separate story but are connected by the same timeline. The last chapter ’His Last Bow’ is an epilogue to the story of Holmes and tells about his after-war experience. So technically it shouldn’t matter in which order you read the stories as long as you keep ’His Last Bow’ as the last one, as they are only faintly connected to each other and every story has it’s own crime scene. For full experience, of course, you should read ALL the books about Sherlock Holmes published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But if you just enjoy reading classical, old-school crime novels then this book would be a fine choice (coming from one who just read his first Sherlock Holmes book).
Shortly and summarized, if it wasn’t clear enough already, the book is mainly about Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson. Together they solve crimes in London and in it’s vicinity (mainly murders). There isn’t really anything special about them, they all feel really cliché and Holmes is the Gary-Stu of detectives. Maybe it’s just my bitterness and my incompetence to understand the early 19th century English, but one will realize eventually that although it’s far from good and nowhere near the perfect crime novel it’s still, after all, the father of all detective novels. Of course it feels cliché and hackneyed because it’s what most of the genre got it’s inspiration from. No one says that CRT televisions look too much like LCD televisions, do they.
In conclusion I think that if you have even a slight piece of interest in Sherlock Holmes and/or classic detective novels, give it a shot. It might feel like riding an old wooden roller coaster with little bumps on the tracks every so often but at the end of it, you might feel like queuing again for an another ride.