Victorian Crime Mystery

Who can resist the appeal of a beautiful woman pleading for assistance after an object she held as among her most precious possessions is mysteriously stolen? And what if that woman happens to be the most celebrated actress in Victorian London? Still recovering from a heartbreaking loss that nearly destroyed him, Dr. Watson is called to return to Baker Street as he ventures beside Holmes into a vast West End theater filled with odd characters and strange clues, all in pursuit of a truth that might be less welcomed by the esteemed client than she may care to face. Looming over all are hints ...

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 ...

While in Paris, where he solves a national crisis on behalf of a grateful French government, Sherlock Holmes is approached by a young nun, who brings to his attention the strange mystery surrounding the theft of a precious relic from the convent chapel that very morning. Impressed by the nun’s intelligence and the considerable powers of deduction she demonstrates before him, Holmes agrees to investigate the events at the convent where she resides in the Norman countryside, only to learn that the little religious community is at the heart of larger events than any of the sisters there have...

Thomas Pitt, mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion, where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow. Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful, notorious Egyptian woman Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion. Pitt’s orders are to protect—at all costs—the good name of the third person in the garden: senior cabinet minister Saville Ryerson. The distinguished public servant, whispered to be Ayesha’s lover, insists that she is as innocent as Pitt himself.

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 ...

Penrose and Pyke go together like fire and kerosene in this first-in-series Victorian era mystery. Trouble’s brewing in the Devil’s Half Acre. A death in an alleyway, a tragic accident in a factory, rumours of a murderer loose on the streets. It’s enough to give a genteel lady a fit of the vapours. Fortunately, Grace Penrose isn’t one to swoon at the sight of blood. All she wants is the chance to become the first female doctor in the colony. Instead, she must confront the harsh realities of the city’s most notorious sweatshop. When the police prove reluctant to investigate the ...

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.

Welcome fans of Sherlockiana, to The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes: Omnibus Four! We hope you’ll enjoy this collection of three short stories, a novella, and a bonus vignette, which is found nowhere else but in this volume, as we return to a time where gas-lights dimly illuminate foggy cobblestone streets….where gangs of child criminals stalk the unwary from the Thames dock yards to the gates of Buckingham Palace….where ruthless blackmailers reside in the shadows, and bribe servants for the secrets of their genteel employers’ lives, all dwelling in a Victorian world, ...

A fourteen-year-old girl with a taste for the legendary and fanciful vanishes without a trace, seemingly into thin air, from her home in a Medieval manor in the Kentish countryside, leaving her parents overcome with concern, amid a household which claims to know nothing of the matter. After two days of frantic searching, including the dragging of nearby waters, and the setting of a famed bloodhound to find the girl’s trail have produced no results whatsoever, the estate’s owner sends an urgent telegram to London, calling on the aid of the most famous detective of his or any era, ...

When Mr. Thomas Tapley is found bludgeoned to death in his sitting room, his neighbor, Inspector Benjamin Ross of Scotland Yard, is immediately summoned. Little is known about the elusive gentleman until Mr. Jonathan Tapley, QC, hears of the news, and the truth about his cousin's tragic past slowly begins to emerge. Meanwhile, Ben's wife, Lizzie, is convinced she saw someone following Thomas Tapley on the day he died, and she discovers that he received a mysterious visitor a few days before his death.

It’s Christmastime in London, and Sherlock Holmes takes on two cases. The angelic three-year-old child of a wealthy couple is the target of a vicious kidnapper, and a country aristocrat worries that his handsome, favourite son has mysteriously vanished from his London pied à terre. Holmes and Watson, aided by the colourful Heffie O’Malley, slip slide in the ice to ensure a merry Christmas is had by nearly everybody.

It was a most peculiar murder. A man's body was found in the canal - but the evidence showed that he had drowned in a bathtub. A theater critic known for his savage reviews, the victim had had a full cast of enemies. While Inspector Witherspoon scoured the theater, his housekeeper and unofficial sleuthing partner Mrs. Jeffries uncovered the critic's secret past: a real-life drama more compelling than any stage play.

London, April 1891. When the severed torso of a woman washes up on the bank of the river Thames, London believes a serial killer from the past has struck again. Crime photographer and investigator Sarah Bain Barrett is on the scene with her friends Mick O’Reilly and Lord Hugh Staunton. This is their chance to solve a cold case and deliver a monster to justice, with help from Sarah’s husband Detective Sergeant Thomas Barrett; her sister Sally Albert, an intrepid newspaper reporter; and Hugh’s psychologist, Dr. Joshua Lewes, a pioneer in the new science of criminal profiling.

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...

It is March 1870. London is in the grip of fog and ice. But Scotland Yard's Inspector Ben Ross has more than the weather to worry about when the body of a young woman is found in a dustbin at the back of a Piccadilly restaurant. Ben must establish who the victim is before he can find out how and why she came to be there. His enquiries lead him first to a bootmaker in Salisbury and then to a landowner in Yorkshire.

Two bodies have been found in a park in the fashionable London neighborhood of Callander Square. While Inspector Thomas Pitt is fighting to get the square’s aristocratic residents to speak with him, his pretty, well-born wife, Charlotte, decides to do some detective work of her own. Soon she is unearthing secrets in every house on the square, while Thomas tries to discover what would drive a person to murder.

Imagine the reaction at 221B Baker Street to a grieving widow’s claim that her late husband has fallen victim to murder, not merely once, but a second time, all within the same week! Thus begins this far-reaching novella, the forty-second title within The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. Venture back to 1880s England, as the world’s foremost detective and his faithful chronicler, seek answers to one of the more confusing cases ever brought to their door. What is the truth in the seeming impossibility of a man who can, not once, but twice be struck down by the cruel arm of death...

When crime creeps into the drawing rooms of the elite, even Sherlock Holmes must tread carefully. In this new collection, Watson recounts cases where Holmes was drawn into the glittering — and treacherous — world of London’s high society. Behind every curtsey and champagne toast lies scandal, deception, and murder. From grand balls to fox hunts, country estates to gentlemen’s clubs, the great detective must navigate etiquette as deftly as evidence, with Watson as his ever-steady guide through a landscape of whispered threats and deadly secrets. A vanished viscount. A deadly ...

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...

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 ...