Over My Dead Body is the third stand-alone novel by award-winning Australian musician, song-writer and author, Dave Warner. Despite some success reviving frozen hamsters, cryonics researcher Dr Georgette Watson is not having much success getting funding for further research. She knows if she could revive a human body, purses might open, but frozen bodies are a bit thin on the ground.

Then a Scottish cousin visits New York City and gives Georgette the remnants of her great great grandfather, John Watson’s diaries from back in the late nineteenth Century. What she reads sends her to a cemetery in Switzerland and yields her the frozen body of John’s dearest friend. And when she successfully revives him, it turns out to be, of course, none other than Sherlock Holmes.

Her experience with cryonics occasionally sees her asked by NYPD Detective Garry Benson to estimate time of death for murder victims: the last two have been young women strangled, sexually assaulted and throats cut, each with a symbol carved into a limb. When a third victim is found, Holmes, incognito as Percy Turner, is very interested in the crime scene.

Investigation is innate in him, and the tools available in the twenty-first are impressive, but something about the killings reminds him of an Italian serial killer from his own day. Here, the Internet comes in handy, and they are soon on a trail, but the list of potential suspects extends with every step, and NYPD are, at first, focussing on an entirely different trail.

The story is told from the perspectives of Georgette, Holmes, Georgette’s father, each of the victims and, anonymously, a murderer who, it seems, has also set his sights on the unsuspecting Georgette herself. There are a few red herrings and plenty of tension in the build-up to a dramatic climax (or two) to keep the reader guessing and the pages turning.

The initial concept requires some suspension of disbelief, but there are plenty of cute moments where Holmes is catching up to over a century’s worth of progress, a hint of potential romance, and lots of humour, especially in scenes that feature Georgette’s sister, Simone. Very entertaining crime fiction.