I enjoyed the manga and seeing more of William James Moriarty. I was a tad disappointed when Sherlock's introduction took up the second half of the story. Hopefully, the next volume remedies that.

Think of the first volume and the first three chapters of this one as the prologue. When viewed in light of the fourth chapter in this second volume - which begins retelling <i>A Study in Scarlet</i>, the first Sherlock Holmes story - everything that comes before it is in service of establishing Moriarty as a criminal consultant prior to his meeting with the man whose nemesis he would become. At this point it doesn't necessarily look as if that's mutual, although we do need to remember the opening pages of volume one in that statement, but more a question of Moriarty finding Sherlock Holmes a useful player in the show he's staging for England's edification. After all, if there's a mystery, there simply must be a detective to solve it.

Eldest brother Albert gets a bit more to do in this book, possibly at the expense of Louis, as he becomes more established as two of the things that Arthur Conan Doyle stated one of the who knows how many brothers of Professor Moriarty did: in the army and in trade. Of course he's not really part of the latter, but what that's a cover for is a lot of fun and introduces another illustrious figure from British fiction into the mix, making this seem like an origin story for pretty much all crime and spy drama. More intriguingly, the series seems like it might be setting up Moriarty and Holmes as friends, which gives their later enmity an interesting angle.

Apart from one or two historical glitches (such as Louis calling for a "stagecoach" rather than a "hansom"), this continues to be solid, recognizable, and still totally original. It's a worthy entry into the pantheon of Sherlockian fiction, and may even please franchise fans more with this second volume.

I think my biggest issue with the story is that it became trite. I'll be honest, I was more interested in Moriarty from the start. Sherlock has gotten his fair share of retellings and remakes, so having a story from Moriarty's POV was refreshing.

The first chapter of the book jumped around so much that by the end of it, I still didn't know what was going on and I was shocked to find out that it was more like a poorly written one-shot.

The characters are still difficult to distinguish from one another, something I had difficulty with in the first book and had hoped would be better by this one, but I spent the majority of the book wondering who several characters were only to realize they were unimportant. All of the young men have the exact same facial structure and have two hair styles to choose from to distinguish them.

Mild spoiler: Sherlock's POV dominates the entire second half of the story, and the story is yet another retelling of some classic cases. Yes there are new twists to it, but honestly I could care less about Sherlock as a character in this. I find him very flat. Having been introduced to Moriarty first, Sherlock seems like a cheap copy of him with too many cliches and "quirks" to make him unique or interesting.

I found the plot interesting up until the final chapter. Learning more about Moriarty's schemes was interesting, and I wanted to see more of what insane stuff he and his brothers did before Sherlock came onto the scene, because obviously Moriarty has to have had criminal connections and his hands in a lot of stuff well before Sherlock ever met him. I feel like bringing Sherlock in was rushed just for the shock factor of "Oh look, it's Moriarty's enemy." Same with many other well-known Sherlock characters.

This is the second volume in the Moriarty manga series, an adaptation that takes significant liberties with the Sherlock Holmes novels and prioritizes the experiences of Moriarty (who bills himself as a criminal consultant). The same problems that plagued the first volume plague this one. Characters are so similar in appearance and dress it is often hard to tell them apart (particularly among the multiple Moriarty brothers) and the changes from the original source text is so extreme that the reader is often left wondering why the author didn't just build a new character and world rather than try to shoehorn their creation into the same realm as an already established property.

In this volume, William James Moriarty and crew start their campaign of destroying the class system by orchestrating a murder of a commoner by a Count. We are also introduced to Sherlock Holmes.