Arthur Conan Doyle - the master behind the mind of English literature's Great Detective - pursues his own fiendish nemesis in this ingenious novel of detection.
In a literary tour de force worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, author David Pirie brings his rich familiarity with both the Doyle biography and the Sherlock Holmes canon to a mystifying
Victorian tale of vengeance and villainy. The howling man on the heath, a gothic asylum, a rune and an impenetrable cipher, the walking dead, the legendary witch of Dunwich, her evil curse -
perils lurk in every turn of the page, as increasingly bizarre encounters challenge the deductive powers of young. Doyle and his mentor, the pioneering criminal investigator Dr. Joseph Bell of
Edinburgh University.
So, too, do the corpses that litter the path of Doyle and Bell's investigation, from the putrescent remains of a recluse deep in the English countryside to the body of a gardener drowned
(impossibly?) in a Suffolk woodland: neither the last nor the least hideous murder to baffle the wits of the two detectives in this chilling, inventive novel.
Yet, for all their bewilderment by obscure clues and contradictory evidence in a series of grisly, seemingly unrelated crimes, of one thing Bell and Doyle are certain. The solution somehow lies
with Thomas Neill Cream, the very man who has led them in a tortuous pursuit to a windswept, cliffside village on the North Sea coast in the dead of winter.
What begins in a dank cottage where Doyle, drugged and barely conscious, has been imprisoned by the reprobate Cream, ends in a surprising confrontation that once again casts the young doctor
against his nemesis, the one-time friend who five years before robbed Doyle of true love and any chance for future happiness.
