Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota

In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe. When experts arrive to open the safe and examine its contents, they make an astonishing discovery. There, inside, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, MD. The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist-known only as the Red Demon-who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway. Set against the backdrop of the real, devastating Hinckley forest fire of 1894, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon is the tense and atmospheric first novel in Larry Millett's classic series of adventures that brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Minnesota.

When one of Minnesota's wealthiest scions goes missing, it's up to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to track a cold-blooded killer. The year is 1896, and the magnificent winter carnival is under way in St. Paul, Minnesota, when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city's most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man has disappeared on the eve of his wedding-and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival's ice palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case. His pursuit of the murderer takes him through the highest echelons of St. Paul society and into cahoots with Shadwell Rafferty, a gregarious saloon owner and part-time private investigator. Soon Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty are embroiled in a perilous adventure that takes them from one frozen corner of the city to another and out onto the treacherous ice of the Mississippi River as they trail a cruel and ruthless killer.

Sherlock Holmes is bored between cases at 221B Baker Street. So when King Oskar II of Sweden-who has heard of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone by a farmer in Minnesota-asks to engage his services, Holmes jumps at the chance to decipher the runes and determine whether the find is real or a hoax. With Dr. John H. Watson by his side, faithfully recording every detail, Holmes makes his way to Minnesota for a third time. But, in the first of many strange and unfortunate coincidences, the farmer who found the mysterious stone is murdered, and the stone itself is stolen on the day the famous detective arrives.With the help of one Shadwell Rafferty, now a friend and partner, Holmes must solve this baffling case to find both the stone and the murderer.

As the city of Minneapolis prepares for a visit from President William McKinley, someone else prepares for murder. On the day before the visit, a union activist is found hanged, naked, outside a ruined mansion. A placard around his neck reads "THE SECRET ALLIANCE HAS SPOKEN." Who is the alliance? What does it want? How was the victim involved with the city's corrupt mayor? And why did he possess a photograph of a prominent citizen in a compromising position? Shadwell Rafferty searches for answers, encountering bribery, corruption, union organizers, anarchists, and conspiracy, putting himself in danger. But as luck would have it, his old friends Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson are on their way. In this fourth installment of Larry Millett's Minnesota Mystery series, Shadwell Rafferty commands center stage in a brand-new city. Packed with Millett's signature historical and architectural detail, this book is deviously delightful.

SHERLOCK HOLMES DISAPPEARS, POLICE SUSPECT FAMED DETECTIVE IN KIDNAPPING AND MURDER reads a New York headline. So begins the fifth mystery in Larry Millett's series. A letter, written in a secret cipher he recognizes all too well, reveals that an old foe of Holmes-a murderer he once captured after an incredible duel of wits-is back, has kidnapped his previous victim's widow, and is now impersonating Holmes himself. Holmes must once again match wits with a particularly cunning adversary, one whose hatred of Holmes has seemingly become the killer's single greatest obsession. Chasing the kidnapper from London to New York to Chicago, Holmes and Watson race to keep up. Every move Holmes makes is expected; every trap proves elusive. Only with the assistance of his American cohort, the saloonkeeper Shadwell Rafferty, can Holmes hope to settle the score once and for all-or be framed for the crime himself.

St. Paul, Minnesota. October 1, 1917. High above the city, a renowned local financier named Artemis Dodge lies face down on the floor of his armored penthouse sanctuary, a single bullet hole in his head. Thirty stories up, in the city's tallest building, and not a shred of evidence or sign pointing to anyone having broken into the wealthy man's fortress. It is, to all appearances, an impossible crime. Enter Shadwell Rafferty: Irishman, St. Paul saloonkeeper, sometime detective, and old friend of the celebrated sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Summoned by Louis B. Hill, son of railroad magnate James J. Hill, to investigate, Rafferty descends into a world dominated by greedy tycoons and awash in political intrigue and wartime fearmongering. Suspects lurk in every corner of the city, including Dodge's beautiful young widow, his slippery assistant, and a shadowy anarchist, and Rafferty pursues them from the streets of Ramsey Hill and the rooms of the Ryan Hotel to the labyrinthine caves under the Schmidt brewery. Matching wits with his foes at the police department and his unsavory rival, the St. Paul detective Mordecai Jones, Rafferty knows that in order to bring a killer to justice he must first unravel the riddle of a single bullet fired in a locked room, three hundred feet above the streets of St. Paul. Set during a bitter streetcar strike and amid the clandestine activities of a ruthless commission charged with enforcing wartime patriotism, Larry Millett has created a classic and perfectly executed locked-room mystery in the great tradition of John Dickson Carr. From locked rooms and civil unrest, to murder and wartime paranoia, “The Magic Bullet” presents Rafferty's most challenging case, and its gripping conclusion, with a timely assist from Sherlock Holmes, finds both Rafferty and Millett at the top of their games.

Dogged by depression, doubt, and (as a trip to the Mayo Clinic has revealed) emphysema, 66-year-old Sherlock Holmes is preparing to return to England when he receives a shock: a note slipped under his hotel room door, from a vicious murderer he'd nearly captured in Munich in 1892. The murderer, known as the Monster of Munich, announces that he has relocated to Eisendorf, a tiny village near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. If Holmes is not what he once was, the same can be said for Eisendorf: once a thriving community founded by German idealists but now a dying town with only forty residents-two of whom have, indeed, died recently under highly mysterious circumstances. Replete with all the gothic richness of Larry Millett's earlier Holmes novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma links events in 1892 Germany with those in small-town Minnesota in 1920 in a double mystery that tests the aging detective's mettle-and the listener's nerve-as never before. Guided by Eisendorf's peculiar archivist and taunted by the Monster, Holmes finds himself drawn into the town's dark history of violence and secrecy, and into the strange tunnels that underscore the old flour mill where answers, and grievous danger, lie in wait. No longer the cool, flawless logician of times past, Holmes must nonetheless match wits with a fiendish opponent who taunts him right up to a final, explosive confrontation.

The ninth and final Minnesota mystery, in which Shadwell Rafferty, with the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, may have solved his own murder. Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case, the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty's death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world's most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend's killer. Set amid the glittering society and sordid underworld of 1928 St. Paul, Larry Millett's ninth and final Shadwell Rafferty mystery takes listeners through the serpentine twists of Rafferty's fatal investigation, even as Holmes, following in Rafferty's tracks, may be closing in on the answer to both cases. This ingenious double mystery takes us to every corner of St. Paul, from the city's most notorious speakeasy to a home for unwed mothers to the mansions of Summit Avenue, and at every turn, we find another suspect: an ambitious mayor and his devoted fixer-in-chief, a heartless blackmailer and a police detective mired in city hall connections, a poet-turned-mystery writer with a suspicious coterie, and a priest hiding a terrible secret. A mysterious woman in Minneapolis who makes certain illicit arrangements and a young man in possession of incriminating documents provide Holmes with vital clues that lead to a final confrontation with an exceptionally devious murderer worthy of the exceptionally devious plot that brings the Minnesota mystery series to a fitting and powerful conclusion.