I feel like I would rather have read two short novels, one about Holmes and one about The World's Fair, than to have read this one oddly-intertwined novel. Both stories were fascinating in their own right, but with there already being the murder subplot in the fair story, why drag Holmes into it? He wasn't connected to the fair, except in his attempts to capitalize on it, and it was distracting for me to jump from one story to the next, even with Larson's (honestly, rather weak) "little did he know" style segues.
