6.4 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publication date 2005 Pages 256 Originally published 2005 Page count 256 Publisher Carroll & Graf Publishers | 3.2/5 Goodreads Language English Media type Print ISBN 0-7867-1548-0 Audio read by Simon Prebble | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Genres Mystery, Speculative fiction, Detective fiction Similar Sherlock Holmes: The Way, The Whitechapel Horrors, The Canary Trainer, Locked Rooms, Justice Hall | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Italian Secretary is mystery fiction by Caleb Carr featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. This literary pastiche is meant as an honourable homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and one that had the approval of the Doyle estate.
Contents
Plot summary
Architect Sir Alistair Sinclair and his foreman, Dennis McKay, have been slain in the midst of rehabilitating the medieval west tower of the Royal Palace of Holyrood—the very wing where Mary, Queen of Scots, had lived, and where David Rizzio had met his brutal, politically motivated end. Mycroft Holmes fears these murders portend new threats against Britain's present monarch—the elderly Queen Victoria, who occasionally lodges at the palace—by a known assassin, perhaps in nefarious league with the German Kaiser. En route north, Holmes and Watson are menaced aboard their train by a red-bearded bomb thrower (supposedly a rabid Scots nationalist), only to discover that still greater dangers await them, and others, at Holyroodhouse. The plaintive drone of a weeping woman, cruelly punctured and shattered corpses, a pool of blood "that never dries", and a disembodied Italian voice with unexpected musical tastes all imply the wrath of wraiths behind recent atrocities. But Holmes and Watson deduce that greed, rather than ghosts, may be to blame.