Enigma of the Silent Alleys: New Adventures Sherlock Holmes

A terrifying phantom stalks the fog-drenched streets of Victorian London, leaving behind a trail of empty cradles and a calling card of dizzying optical malice.When an ordinary deal crate from the river steps at Wapping lands on the rug at 221B Baker Street, it shatters Sherlock Holmes's brooding melancholy. Inside rest five brilliantly lacquered wooden spheres scored with hypnotic spirals-and a stark white sixth ball bearing an insolent challenge in violet ink: "Five vanished in the London fog; five empty cradles across the Thames.When the sixth ball comes to rest, Mr. Holmes, the final ship sets sail."Within minutes, an exasperated Inspector Lestrade arrives with news of a nightmare made real: Julian Crane, the nine-year-old heir of an eminent shipping baronet, has vanished in broad daylight from a fashionable Holborn arcade-snatched directly through a cordon of forty Scotland Yard detectives. Like the four children who vanished before him across London, the boy dissolved into thin air without a cry or a struggle. Left behind upon the wet flagstones was only a single, brightly painted juggling ball.To unmask a predator who conceals his identity beneath the drab, invisible plumage of London's municipal workforce, Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson must dissect a web of physiological terror, from the narcotic chemistry of Swiss confections to the optical science of kinetic fixation. But as the tide begins to turn on the lower reaches of the Thames, Holmes realizes they are not hunting an ordinary footpad or ransom-seeker. They are pursuing a perverted aristocrat turned master illusionist-an aesthetic predator preparing to ship six innocent souls into irreversible foreign servitude.With the clock racing toward high water at the Nore, Holmes and Watson board a high-pressure police launch into the freezing, desolate marshes of Canvey Island for a final, lethal confrontation.Rich in authentic Victorian atmosphere, clinical deduction, and Doylean storytelling, Enigma of the Silent Alleys pits the analytical engine of Baker Street against an adversary who turned the playthings of childhood into an instrument of absolute betrayal.