Showing results by author "C. Thorne" in All Categories

Allow us to present the novella Death in the Black Forest, the most recent volume in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, where a Medieval castle in the heart of Germany’s fabled Black Forest sounds like the most idyllic spot imaginable, and yet it is to just this locale that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are summoned amid the notoriously cold winter of January 1887, after four young men in domestic service at the castle have been found dead following what are claimed to be bizarre accidents. Two have fallen from the castle battlements, one was found drowned in the dark ...

Enter the fog-cloaked past, as Sherlock Holmes undertakes his first case since recovering from an attempt on his life that left him wounded in body and spirit, traveling to the westernmost reaches of Suffolk, where a client from a previous mystery, a retired military man named Colonel Morley, has pleaded for aid in finding his young grandson, who went missing from his bed sometime in the night. Thus do Holmes and Watson venture to a secluded country estate with a long history of hauntings, which members of the staff claim are manifesting once more, centering around the infamous spirit of an...

Step away from the modern world with The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes: Omnibus Five, by C. Thorne, a collection of four short stories, a novella, and a bonus vignette, which is found nowhere else but in this volume! Come with us in The Mystery of Wyvern Hall, as a fourteen-year-old girl with a taste for the legendary and fanciful vanishes without a trace from her home in a Medieval manor in the Kentish countryside…. Follow along in The Case of the Kaiser’s Assassin, as Holmes seeks to prevent war, when a diabolically bold assassin stalks the German Emperor on a trip to ...

When a letter from Salisbury reaches Baker Street one morning in 1887, its writer telling of his fears relating to a matter he will only discuss in person, Holmes is intrigued. Yet when that would-be client turns up dead less than a day before he was to have made the journey up to London, Holmes’ interest in the case becomes, in his words, “a matter of personal honour.” So begins A Slaying in Salisbury, the latest volume in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, a murder mystery in which nearly everyone within an entire town not far from Stonehenge, could be regarded as ...

On a fittingly cold night in the last year of the 19th century, Holmes’ evening is shattered by the intrusion of a Russian diplomat and his entourage, who come bursting into 221B Baker Street, and he soon finds himself pursuing a case of a young lady’s abduction, a crime which must be kept quiet lest its ramifications threaten to take two of the major powers of Europe to the brink of a potentially volatile international crisis. Told not through the pen of Doctor Watson, but from within Holmes’ own mind as the time-sensitive investigation unfolds, The Case of the Russian Ambassador’s...

“Never ignore evidence,” has long been among the most central mottos in the life and career of Victorian England’s greatest detective, and so it is that the claims of a letter-writer from the wildest corner of Wales draws Sherlock Holmes away from London on the day before an impending full moon, to investigate news that during each of the last two months, on nights when the moon shone at its brightest, a horrifying creature, matching descriptions from an ancient legend, has swept down from the rugged Cambrian Mountains to brutally prey upon livestock, and terrify all who dwell ...

“What an irony it is that what would turn out to be among my friend Sherlock Holmes’ oddest cases began with a seaside holiday….” So commences the reminiscence of Dr. John H. Watson, as he relates a serpentine tale dubbed “The Haunting of the Jersey Lily,” in which he and Holmes are unexpectedly wrapped up in a mystery that seems to have its beginnings in what the famed client insists was no less than a visitation from a man she knew to be dead. With a scene that shifts from Cornwall, to the north of the nation, and back again to the crowded avenues of Victoria’s London, the ...

A visitor to Baker Street comes amid the rains of March in 1889, speaking of the shadowy world of séances and mediumship, subjects about which the ever-rational Holmes has little patience, nor is he any more approving when an accusation is made concerning his role in a past case that saw a convicted murderer hanged, yet when events unfold to draw Holmes to a manor in Wiltshire where the British Séance Society makes its headquarters, he soon finds himself caught up in a case that appears to Watson to have the involvement of the paranormal as its most likely explanation. It’s all inside ...

Three murders in a single moonless night, each ending in the death of a seemingly unconnected victim, separated by distance and circumstance, united only in the brutally efficient method by which each met their death, and by the fact each had been a passenger on the same Glasgow-to-London train. What conclusions can Sherlock Holmes draw from this confusing set of facts, and will he be able to identify who is behind the crimes, and why he has undertaken so violent a spree of death? Find out in The Case of the Hammer Murders, the forty-seventh mystery in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock ...

A forceful young typist arrives at 221B Baker Street on the first of April, 1886, with the alarming news that her employer, an eccentric old professor for whom she’d worked for just over two months, had suddenly vanished without a trace from his home, and to make matters worse, she has discovered the house occupied by three others whom she has never before met, who claim to have resided in the home for over a year, and to know of no professor ever being in residence there. What is the truth of the matter? Whatever has transpired in the seemingly quite ordinary suburban London home? Find ...

“It is the mystery not the object,” Holmes explains to Watson on the morning he is summoned to find the whereabouts of a missing wedding cake to be served at the reception of one of the most celebrated society events of the season. Heading out at once through the Surrey countryside to the estate of a nearly extinct noble family, Holmes soon finds that sinister undercurrents belie the idyllic setting of what the bride’s mother, the dowager Lady Prudence describes as the happiest day of her daughter’s life.

Leave behind the hectic pressures of the present-day and return for a little while to the era of Queen Victoria's storied reign, as on Boxing Day 1894, one of the most celebrated men in all London, the famed writer Oscar Wilde, pays a call at 221B Baker Street, bringing distressing news of a theft which stands to see the manuscript for a novel he dubs nothing less than his magum opus, released before the world under the name of a dastardly plagiarist. Wilde's plea for aid soon has Sherlock Holmes on the trail of this missing treasure of high literary art, setting himself up against a ...

One year after the puzzling case that would go on to be known as The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street again finds himself confronted by a mystery surrounded by claims of preternatural events, when a young lady becomes caught in a living nightmare which began after her visit to a museum exposed her to the presence of a black marble sculpture of a Renaissance angel, tainted by a long and sinister history. Will this episode of unnatural torment in the heart of London prove the one instance out of an entire career in which cold logic may not triumph, and the diabolical...

Dr. Watson would call it Sherlock Holmes’ darkest and most haunting case...the evening Baker Street was visited by a young woman who came alone, pleading for aid in saving her father, an innocent man, she claims, from the gallows in a mere seven days, and in so doing, taking the great detective and his faithful chronicler down a twisted pathway to truth. From a gloom-filled murder scene in the heart of the city, to the dismal corridors of Reading Gaol, and into the complex and often-cold mind of Sherlock Holmes himself, here tragedy and hope collide in the swirling London fog of long ago.

What begins with a pleasant Saturday evening gathering at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Watson, where Sherlock Holmes relates a solo case undertaken in a graveyard in the English Midlands, gives way on Monday to an ardent plea for Holmes’ help in returning a young kidnapping victim to her terrified parents. The only clue at the investigation’s start is a harsh ransom note in which the brutal abductors vow to send back one of the girl’s fingers should outsiders be brought into the case. Making haste to the home of a learned astronomer and his wife in a rural village east of London, Holmes ...

In this fourth volume of The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes and Watson are visited at Baker Street by an academic who claims his school's most treasured secret possession, no less than the mummified head of the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, has been stolen from his office. As Holmes' investigation takes him from the streets of London, to the rolling downs of Suffolk, to the thriving holiday town of Brighton read along as the world's greatest consulting detective attempts to pierce the mystery of how, when, and by whom England's most long-sought human artifact...

Collected together for the first time are these four tales from The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, each a particular favourite of both the author, and his readers. Included are: The Case of the Kaiser’s Assassin, in which Holmes is summoned to prevent the murder of Kaiser Wilhelm II, during his visit to England… The Demon of the Mountain, which tells of a British officer, returned from hellish captivity at the hands of a tribe in Afghanistan, now seemingly pursued by the very cultists he has escaped…. The Yew Alley Ghost, details the disappearance of the grandson of a ...

An historic necklace tied to a tumultuous love affair between Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb back in the early days of the century, gifted by a starry-eyed suitor to a young American woman visiting London with her family, is audaciously stolen from a posh hôtel suite in broad daylight on a stormy afternoon, and provides the impetus for Sherlock Holmes to respond to the outcry of an angry father, who consults with him at 221B Baker Street, leading the great detective to investigate the circumstances of the necklace’s cruelly well-planned theft. Who has absconded with the glittering ...

Come along as two legends of the Victorian era meet, in The Adventure of the Artful Dodger! As newlywed-to-be Dr. John Watson counts down the remaining fortnight until his wedding to Miss Mary Morstan, Baker Street plays host to a man Holmes admiringly dubs “criminal royalty,” the one-time Artful Dodger, himself. Now well-beyond his long-ago past as a master pickpocket, and known simply as Jack Dawkins, the Dodger comes bearing a warning that a new danger has arisen to the youth of the East End, as the most insidious leader of a gang of child thieves since Fagin himself has taken to ...

A three AM knock at the door of 221B Baker Street, soon sends Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson out into the blanketing fog of a cold London night, where they are led by Inspector McPherson of Scotland Yard to an empty building, where four bodies, each the victim of a different manner of foul play, lie discarded like so much refuse. Amid the room the clues Holmes uncovers are strange, even contradictory, and seem to lead to more questions than answers, as he finds himself set about solving a mystery that taxes even the considerable powers of his brain, and leads to a conclusion as horrifying ...