When a beer barrel containing the body of a man is delivered to the door of 221b Baker Street, an intoxicating new adventure begins for Sherlock Holmes. Together with his faithful companion, Dr. John Watson, Holmes travels north to Burton-upon-Trent to investigate the poisoning of a regiment in India from a contaminated batch of pale ale. The incident threatens the reputation of the mighty brewer, Houghton's, which supplies beer to half the world. But Holmes is not the only detective working the case.

It has taken over 80 years, but at long last, the British government’s embargo on reporting this slice of diplomatic history has been lifted. It was in November 1940 that a senior minister at the British foreign office in blacked-out London commissioned Holmes and Watson to go to Berlin to negotiate a prisoner of war swap with the German high command. And the price demanded by Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Göbbels, for any prisoner's release? That the two work with the Berlin police to capture a serial killer who is stalking the city’s railway network.

You are about to listen to one of the rare stories to come to light involving "Sigerson", the name Sherlock Holmes went by during the years when the world thought he was dead - his Great Hiatus! This story also has the distinction of being the true first sequel to Horace Holly's She. The only heretofore known sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, records events that occurred two decades after She. This new tale, then, is a record of the events that took place between the previously published adventures.

When misadventure led a schoolboy in London to employment at Baker Street, few could have guessed where his introduction to Sherlock Holmes would lead. But as the lad matures and he finds himself caught in the middle of a murder investigation, his friendship with Holmes and Watson lures him into the role of detective. 'Billy' documents his experiences, and soon his sleuthing skills not only bring him to another murder, but also lay the foundation for his metamorphosis into a famous mystery writer.

When two prison guards are found beheaded in the barren countryside surrounding Her Majesty's Prison at Wormwood Scrubs, Inspector Lestrade seeks Holmes' singular powers to determine how the murders could have been committed in separate locations with the only footprints being those of the murdered guards themselves. With Doctor Watson at his side, Holmes sets out on this new adventure and uncovers deeper mysteries still.

Nothing that is secret can remain secret forever. But is it possible that some crimes are better left undiscovered? Join Holmes and Watson as they travel from London to storm-wracked Bedfordshire, where the great detective finds himself uncovering the grisly truth concerning a half-century old murder.

Mrs. Watson continues her hilarious career as a female Sherlock Holmes casting her net widely to include solving the Long Island Cave Mystery, bringing the murderer of an English woman found dead in Baden-Baden to justice, and finding a Holy Grail for a Scottish Laird.

When Mrs. Hudson asks Holmes and Watson to find a missing girl, neither men expected what they would find. Along with Lestrade, they are plunged into a case of abduction and murder. As they race from Marylebone, to Finchley, to Wapping, and back again, time is running out for them to solve the case without further casualties. With two of their own under threat, the pressure is mounting to catch and stop the group known as "Hellfire Heirs".

An eclectic mix of eight stories drawn from the annals of the MX Series of New Sherlock Holmes stories and the many Holmes anthologies of Belanger Books, all from the pen of emerging pastiche author Stephen Herczeg.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as any of his adventures.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity. Based on original material and previously unavailable documents, this acclaimed book is the definitive biography of the man considered by many to be the founding father of modern electrical technology.

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Enough time has passed. Dr. John Watson can finally reopen his tin box of chronicles. In this astonishing collection, a treasure trove of new accounts of Sherlock Holmes’s extraordinary skills finally comes to light. What is the connection between murderous attacks on a colonel’s wife and the legend of King Arthur? Why is a disgraced former ship captain stalking his neighbor? Who stole the statue of The Dying Gaul from a completely secure museum in Rome? Find the answers to these confounding mysteries and more in seven exhilarating new short stories.

Did you ever wonder where Sherlock Holmes found the Persian slipper he keeps his shag tobacco in? Had Holmes and Watson ever met before that day at St. Barts? Did Holmes really believe in curses when he said he did? Dr. John Watson reveals the answers to these questions in The Persian Slipper and Other Stories, along with cases involving the putative Naval Man, a night spent at a gentlemen’s club, Holmes’ second marriage proposal, a movable tree, and a surprising wedding ending.

Sherlock Holmes hears the distressing tale of Miss Mary Sutherland. It seems that something unexpected and mysterious has happened to her fiancee, Hosmar Angel. Is it a simple case of cold feet? Holmes finds something far more diabolical, lurking deep beneath the surface.

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

In the summer of 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira - archaeological treasure hunter and denizen of Jerusalem's bustling marketplace - arrived unannounced in London claiming to have discovered the world's oldest Bible scroll. When news of the discovery leaked to the excited English press, Shapira became a household name. But before the British Museum could acquire them, Shapira's nemesis, French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau, denounced his find as a fraud.

The best-selling author of the Alienist series returns with a chilling elaboration on the Sherlock Holmes canon, as the famed detective investigates a pair of gruesome murders, which cast an otherworldly shadow as far as Queen Victoria herself.

An intimate friend of Adolf Hitler’s who turned against him during the Nazi rise to power delves into the character of one of history’s most evil dictators. Of American and German parentage, Ernst Hanfstaengl graduated from Harvard and ran the family business in New York for a dozen years before returning to Germany in 1921. By chance he heard a then little-known Adolf Hitler speaking in a Munich beer hall and, mesmerized by his extraordinary oratorical power, was convinced the man would some day come to power. As Hitler’s fanatical theories and ideas hardened, however, he surrounded himself with rabid extremists...

In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.

No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire.

Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists - regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan - rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand–up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln.

They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river - just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.

In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.

Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.

In her graceful, compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles the history of the Copernican Revolution, relating the story of astronomy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. In its midst will be her play, And the Sun Stood Still, imagining the dialogue that would have transpired between Rheticus and Copernicus in their months together. As she achieved with her bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel expands the bounds of science writing, giving us an unforgettable portrait of scientific achievement.