A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

In re-creating Sherlock Holmes in previous books as an adjunct to her chief protagonist, Mary Russell, King has set up the couple's adventures in a milieu consistent with her own creation and, although true to the place and period, independent of Conan Doyle's work. Now, delightfully, she revives faint echoes of Doyle in bringing the Holmeses back to Dartmoor and the scene of one of the Great Detective's classic cases, involving "the footsteps of a giant hound."

Holmes has been invited by his old friend the Rev. Baring-Gould to look into not only an unexplained death on the moor but, more important in the ancient cleric's mind, sightings of a phantom coach on the moor—possibly inhabited by a phantom noblewoman and accompanied by some phantom dogs.

Holmes, in turn, pulls Mary from her studies at Oxford, enlists her in the quest, and finds himself taking a second seat to her endeavors. True to their expectations on the forbidding and difficult moor, the rumors have a real-world explanation, but it is one that combines more wild emotion, surprise, and frightening suspense than any ghost story could.

"The great marvel of King's series is that she's managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes's character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy, and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart"
   THE WASHINGTON POST