As a young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle, famously studied under the pioneering forensic detective Dr. Joseph Bell. Taking this as a starting point, author David Pirie has woven a compelling thriller which partners Bell (widely believed to be the model for Sherlock Holmes himself) and Doyle as innovators in criminal investigation, exploring the strange underworld of violence and sexual hypocrisy running below the surface of the Victorian era.
When the impoverished young Arthur Doyle opens his first medical practice, he is puzzled by the symptoms presented by Heather Grace, a sweet young woman whose parents have died tragically several years before. Heather has a strange eye complaint, but is also upset by visions of a phantom bicyclist who vanishes as soon as he is followed. This enigma, however, is soon overshadowed as Doyle finds himself embroiled in more threatening events-including the murder of a rich Spanish businessman-that call for the advice of the eminent Dr Bell. But despite coming to Doyle's aid, Dr Bell dismisses the murder of Senor Garcia as a rather unimportant diversion from the incident which Bell considers to have real criminal implications: the matter of the patient's eyes and the solitary cyclist.
1895. Victorian England trembles on the verge of hysteria in Vaughn Entwistle's The Dead Assassin. Terrorist bombs are detonating around the Capitol and every foreigner is suspected of being an Anarchist lurking beneath a cape.
Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle is summoned to the scene of a gruesome crime that has baffled and outraged Scotland Yard's best. A senior member of Her Majesty's government has been brutally murdered, and the body of his attacker lies close by--riddled with bullets. More perplexing, one of the attending detectives recognizes the dead assassin as Charlie Higginbotham, a local Cockney pickpocket and petty thief. Higginbotham is not just an improbable suspect, but an impossible suspect, for the young detective watched him take the drop two weeks previously, hanged at Newgate Prison.
Conan Doyle calls in his friend Oscar Wilde for assistance and soon the two authors find themselves swept up in an investigation so bizarre it defies conventional wisdom and puts the lives of their loved ones, the Nation, and even the Monarch herself in dire peril. The murders continue, committed by a shadowy cadre of seemingly unstoppable assassins. As the sinister plot unravels, an implausible theory becomes the only possible solution: someone is reanimating the corpses of executed criminals and sending them shambling through the London fog... programmed for murder.
The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle