Unquiet spirits A Sherlock Holmes adventure

Bonnie MacBird

Book - 2017

London. December 1889. Fresh from debunking a "ghostly" hound in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes has returned to London, only to find himself the target of a deadly vendetta. A beautiful client arrives with a tale of ghosts, kidnapping and dynamite on a whisky estate in Scotland, but brother Mycroft trumps all with an urgent assignment in the South of France. On the fabled Riviera, Holmes and Watson encounter treachery, explosions, rival French Detective Jean Vidocq ... and a terrible discovery. This propels the duo northward to the snowy highlands. There, in a "haunted" castle and among the copper dinosaurs of a great whisky distillery, they and their young client face mortal danger, and Holmes realizes all three cases have b...lended into a single, deadly conundrum. In order to solve the mystery, the ultimate rational thinker must confront a ghost from his own past. But Sherlock Holmes does not believe in ghosts ... or does he?

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Subjects
Genres
Detective and mystery fiction
Spy fiction
Mystery fiction
Historical fiction
Published
London : Collins Crime Club, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2017.
Language
English
Main Author
Bonnie MacBird (author)
Item Description
"Whisky, Ghosts, Murder"--Jacket.
Physical Description
xiii, 497 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780008201081
9780008129729
9780008129712
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

MacBird's outstanding sequel to 2015's Art in the Blood melds a twisty, multilayered plot with a plausible exploration of Sherlock Holmes's life before Watson. The detective is unusually rude toward a prospective client, Isla McLaren, who seeks his help concerning a series of strange events at her husband's ancestral home in the Scottish Highlands, Braedern Castle. A decade earlier, her mother-in-law died of exposure after being locked out of the castle. More recently, a servant fell to his death, and, a few days before Isla's Baker Street consultation, a maid disappeared for two days before reappearing with all her hair shorn, reviving stories that Braedern Castle is haunted. Holmes refuses to help, but a request from brother Mycroft to look into an epidemic that's devastating French vineyards, believed to be the product of British bioengineering, leads him back to the affairs of the McLarens, who are in the whiskey business. The risks that MacBird takes with her characterizations pay off and will make Sherlockians eager for more from her. Agent: Linda Langton, Langton's International Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson tangle with murder, vinicultural sabotage, and reputed ghosts in a Scottish whisky baron's estate.Holmes, that exemplary man of science, doesn't believe in ghosts. Neither does Watson, who does believe in the hauntings of memory. Although Watson is very taken by Isla McLaren when she visits Baker Street beseeching Holmes' help in investigating the mysterious disappearance of parlormaid Fiona Paisley, who was returned to the family estate in Braedern two days later tied in a basket with her hair cut off, Holmes is clearly antagonized by the prospective client's sharp eye and sharp tongue. Holmes dismisses Isla's fear that Fiona's kidnapping and the threatening note that accompanied her return are only the latest of a string of family misfortunes that go back to the killing of her brother Donal in Khartoum and the fate of her mother, Lady Elizabeth, who froze to death after she was accidentally locked out of the manse and now allegedly haunts the East Tower. It's only after Holmes, sent to the south of France by his brother, Mycroft, to look into charges that British distillers may have deliberately introduced a nasty mite that feasts on French grapevines, is present when the severed head of the once-again-missing maid turns up in a ghoulishly unexpected way that he's moved to accept the invitation of Sir Robert McLaren. McLaren, the laird of Braedern and Isla's father-in-law, needs Holmes first to visit his estate and then to investigate a mystery whose tentacles threaten to unspool in every direction imaginable. As in Art in the Blood (2015), MacBird presents a Holmes unusually susceptible to violent emotions and actions, captures Watson's voice without undue strain, manufactures endless complications, and boldly augments the history of Holmes' early days, though the sprawling web of crimes and perpetrators inevitably leaves some loose ends dangling. Even readers who shake their heads over the unprecedented fissure that opens between Holmes and Watson will be impressed by the generosity of her plotting and the audacity with which she reimagines Holmes. A superior pastiche which, like the early work of Sena Jeter Naslund and Laurie R. King, is less interested in looking back to 1889, its nominal setting, than in refitting the Great Detective to modern sensibilities. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.