The Italian Secretary

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The Italian Secretary
Author Caleb Carr
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Detective & Mystery novel
Publisher Carroll & Graf
Publication date 2005
Media type Print (Paperback)
Pages 266 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN ISBN 0-7867-1548-0 (paperback edition)

The Italian Secretary is mystery fiction by Caleb Carr. 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

[edit] Plot introduction

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are summoned to Scotland by Mycroft Holmes to investigate a case of double murder.

[edit] 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 Queen Mary had lived, and where Rizzio had met his brutal, politically motivated end. Mycroft fears these murders portend new threats against Britain's present monarch--the elderly Queen Victoria, who infrequently 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.

[edit] Characters in The Italian Secretary

[edit] Release details