Showing results by author "C. Thorne" in All Categories

Dr. Watson’s walk home to 221B Baker Street one afternoon is abruptly delayed as he comes upon the aftermath of the collapse of a building under construction in the heart of London. Rushing in to give aid to any survivors, Watson soon finds that Sherlock Homes has likewise been drawn to the scene, after hearing the cacophonous noise of the disaster as it unfolded. What begins as a straightforward rescue mission soon unfolds into a mystery with a deep darkness at its heart, as shocking facts arise unforeseen in The Riddle of the Three Builders, the fifty-fourth tale in author C. Thorne’s...

Allow us to present the novella Death in the Black Forest, the most recent volume in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, where a Medieval castle in the heart of Germany’s fabled Black Forest sounds like the most idyllic spot imaginable, and yet it is to just this locale that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are summoned amid the notoriously cold winter of January 1887, after four young men in domestic service at the castle have been found dead following what are claimed to be bizarre accidents. Two have fallen from the castle battlements, one was found drowned in the dark ...

Don your deerstalker cap and escape back to a late-Victorian yesteryear amid the melodious notes of a well-tuned Stradivarius, with The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes: Omnibus One, which brings together the first eight stories in the ongoing accounts of a number of Holmes’ adventures that were until recently lost to time, only to be rediscovered in our own age. Travel along from the dark heart of Whitechapel, and to the wide-open moors of Yorkshire…. Read of an allegedly cursed statue inside a Neo-Gothic museum…. Enter a decaying house beside the Thames whose walls are ...

Dr. Watson is startled one day by Holmes’ news of an audacious train robbery, which occurred overnight on the wind-swept moors of Yorkshire. With haste the pair proceed north only to find the case which lies before them is far stranger than logic or common sense would dictate. Watson wonders aloud why the thieves would have carried out so daring a raid when the jewels aboard the train could have been gotten to in a far easier manner back in London.

Who can resist the appeal of a beautiful woman pleading for assistance after an object she held as among her most precious possessions is mysteriously stolen? And what if that woman happens to be the most celebrated actress in Victorian London? Still recovering from a heartbreaking loss that nearly destroyed him, Dr. Watson is called to return to Baker Street as he ventures beside Holmes into a vast West End theater filled with odd characters and strange clues, all in pursuit of a truth that might be less welcomed by the esteemed client than she may care to face. Looming over all are hints ...

Into the parlour of Baker Street one morning in 1883 comes the kind-hearted landlady of a west-London boarding house, bringing Sherlock Holmes a singular tale of one of her residents, whose puzzling disappearance is made all the more incredible by the fact this man, whom all who knew him took for slightly touched in the head, had made the claim that he was in fact from nearly a century in the future. What has become of this odd individual, and what is to be made of his apparently sincere claim that he is a time traveler? Take a journey to 221B Baker Street, and learn the truth in The Man ...

Three murders in a single moonless night, each ending in the death of a seemingly unconnected victim, separated by distance and circumstance, united only in the brutally efficient method by which each met their death, and by the fact each had been a passenger on the same Glasgow-to-London train. What conclusions can Sherlock Holmes draw from this confusing set of facts, and will he be able to identify who is behind the crimes, and why he has undertaken so violent a spree of death? Find out in The Case of the Hammer Murders, the forty-seventh mystery in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock ...

When a letter from Salisbury reaches Baker Street one morning in 1887, its writer telling of his fears relating to a matter he will only discuss in person, Holmes is intrigued. Yet when that would-be client turns up dead less than a day before he was to have made the journey up to London, Holmes’ interest in the case becomes, in his words, “a matter of personal honour.” So begins A Slaying in Salisbury, the latest volume in The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, a murder mystery in which nearly everyone within an entire town not far from Stonehenge, could be regarded as ...

Imagine the reaction at 221B Baker Street to a grieving widow’s claim that her late husband has fallen victim to murder, not merely once, but a second time, all within the same week! Thus begins this far-reaching novella, the forty-second title within The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. Venture back to 1880s England, as the world’s foremost detective and his faithful chronicler, seek answers to one of the more confusing cases ever brought to their door. What is the truth in the seeming impossibility of a man who can, not once, but twice be struck down by the cruel arm of death...

During an unseasonably warm September, an army captain known to Watson from his own service in Afghanistan, comes to Baker Street telling of being stalked by an assassin from the bizarre cult of “the Demon of the Mountain,” a member of a tribe of utter primitives who held this officer captive through two years of war, inflicting onto him both torments and puzzlingly extravagant honours, until the day this man was able to carry out his improbable escape, and make his way back down the unholy mountain, and return to his comrades in arms. Now back in England after so long a time away, this...

“What an irony it is that what would turn out to be among my friend Sherlock Holmes’ oddest cases began with a seaside holiday….” So commences the reminiscence of Dr. John H. Watson, as he relates a serpentine tale dubbed “The Haunting of the Jersey Lily,” in which he and Holmes are unexpectedly wrapped up in a mystery that seems to have its beginnings in what the famed client insists was no less than a visitation from a man she knew to be dead. With a scene that shifts from Cornwall, to the north of the nation, and back again to the crowded avenues of Victoria’s London, the ...

“It is the mystery not the object,” Holmes explains to Watson on the morning he is summoned to find the whereabouts of a missing wedding cake to be served at the reception of one of the most celebrated society events of the season. Heading out at once through the Surrey countryside to the estate of a nearly extinct noble family, Holmes soon finds that sinister undercurrents belie the idyllic setting of what the bride’s mother, the dowager Lady Prudence describes as the happiest day of her daughter’s life.

Collected together for the first time are these four tales from The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, each a particular favourite of both the author, and his readers. Included are: The Case of the Kaiser’s Assassin, in which Holmes is summoned to prevent the murder of Kaiser Wilhelm II, during his visit to England… The Demon of the Mountain, which tells of a British officer, returned from hellish captivity at the hands of a tribe in Afghanistan, now seemingly pursued by the very cultists he has escaped…. The Yew Alley Ghost, details the disappearance of the grandson of a ...

An historic necklace tied to a tumultuous love affair between Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb back in the early days of the century, gifted by a starry-eyed suitor to a young American woman visiting London with her family, is audaciously stolen from a posh hôtel suite in broad daylight on a stormy afternoon, and provides the impetus for Sherlock Holmes to respond to the outcry of an angry father, who consults with him at 221B Baker Street, leading the great detective to investigate the circumstances of the necklace’s cruelly well-planned theft. Who has absconded with the glittering ...

Together for the first time with all-new illustrations, are these collected vignettes, the bonus stories which graced the pages of Omnibuses Two, Three, Four, and Five, available now to those who may have had an interest in these little tales, but who did not purchase an entire Omnibus in order to see them. These short reads should nonetheless delight fans new and old of The Continuing Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. Read along in The Case of Mrs. Hudson’s Insight, as everyone’s favourite London landlady solves a case which had at least momentarily eluded Sherlock Holmes. In The Mystery ...

A visitor to Baker Street comes amid the rains of March in 1889, speaking of the shadowy world of séances and mediumship, subjects about which the ever-rational Holmes has little patience, nor is he any more approving when an accusation is made concerning his role in a past case that saw a convicted murderer hanged, yet when events unfold to draw Holmes to a manor in Wiltshire where the British Séance Society makes its headquarters, he soon finds himself caught up in a case that appears to Watson to have the involvement of the paranormal as its most likely explanation. It’s all inside ...

What promises to be a tranquil evening in the early years of Holmes and Watson’s time at Baker Street is interrupted via a letter sent by a curator at the British Museum, who rather imperiously demands Holmes appear before him that night in the museum’s archives, and lend aid to what he describes as a threat to his honour, and perhaps his very life. Plunging out into the intemperate night, Watson joins Holmes as he enters into the vast after-hours reaches of the world’s largest museum, and there, in the darkness, meets a man whose secret past stands in contrast to the circumstances of...

Literature as fast as arrows! Whether you call them flash-fiction, micro-stories, or something else entirely, they’re tales that zip along from start to finish in almost the blink of an eye. In Flash Fiction: Micro-Stories, the offerings all have either: 10 words 25 words Or 50 words But no more! Read them in seconds, remember them through a lifetime! These more than 700 stories from many genres, tell tales of past, present, future, some comforting, some shocking, a few downright maddening, but whether you have thirty-seconds to invest in reading, or limitless hours, we think you’ll ...

Dr. Watson would call it Sherlock Holmes’ darkest and most haunting case...the evening Baker Street was visited by a young woman who came alone, pleading for aid in saving her father, an innocent man, she claims, from the gallows in a mere seven days, and in so doing, taking the great detective and his faithful chronicler down a twisted pathway to truth. From a gloom-filled murder scene in the heart of the city, to the dismal corridors of Reading Gaol, and into the complex and often-cold mind of Sherlock Holmes himself, here tragedy and hope collide in the swirling London fog of long ago.

The peace of 221B Baker Street is abruptly shattered when a fleeing woman arrives hammering at the front door, having run miles to reach the famed address. It soon becomes clear from her narrative that this terrified soul is fleeing her husband, and pleads sanctuary and aid, while telling a story as horrific as it is shocking, for this runaway wife claims that she has wed a heartless Bluebeard, a man who has marriedand murdered—four women before her, and now this charming monster intends that she, the fifth bride, is to be his latest victim. Indeed, she reveals the man has already made ...