Adventure of the Seven Clockwork Beetles: New Adventures Sherlock Holmes

Seven priceless, jewel-encrusted scarabs. Seven locked-room visitations. Seven lethal doses of an untraceable Eastern poison.It is a bleak, rain-swept autumn morning in 1895 when a terrified young governess, Miss Mary Sutherland, bursts into the sitting-room at 221B Baker Street, clutching a velvet-draped casket. For seven consecutive mornings, behind the bolted oak doors and iron-barred windows of the desolate Blackwood Manor in Surrey, she has awakened to find an exquisite mechanical beetle resting upon her pillow. Each automaton is wrought of burnished bronze, inlaid with precious rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, and engineered to crawl across her chamber in an unvarying, mathematically perfect eight-inch circle.Scotland Yard is baffled, dismissing the affair as a malicious prank or an episode of hysterical hallucination. But when Sherlock Holmes applies his lens to the microscopic gears, he discovers a horrifying reality: the micro-automata are lubricated not with watchmaker's oil, but with the concentrated, volatile resin of the deadly Upas tree and Datura fastuosa-the legendary "Madness Leaf" of the East Indies. Warmed by the heat of a sleeping victim, the vapor slowly attacks the motor centers of the brain, inducing madness and culminating in undetectable cardiac paralysis.Why would an assassin expend a fortune in jewels, rare Eastern toxicology, and micro-horological mastery to destroy a penniless governess?As Holmes and Watson travel into the gloomy depths of Surrey, they uncover an ancient estate rotting under the shadow of ruined fortunes, an eight-year-old heir whose ninth birthday holds the key to a vast inheritance, and an invisible killer who moves through stone walls without leaving a trace.