Arthur and George by Julian Barnes is a potboiler, a thoughtful thriller, a shirttails-grabbing day-ruining page-turner, a piece of very good fiction, a careful portrait of two men's very different lives entwined, a magnifying glass applied to faith and justice, another happy pill for Sherlockians in this age of awe for the master, and for the non-Sherlockians, a terrific novel. I ended up in a diner on Waverly Street, skipping a meeting, because I couldn't put it down.