Murder Rooms: The Night Calls (Hardcover)

A series of bizarre assaults on women in the brothels of 1878 Edinburgh draws the attention of Dr Joseph Bell, a surgeon, charismatic teacher and forensic expert who periodically applies his deductive skills to solving crimes. Together with a young Conan Doyle, his "trusted clerk and pupil," Bell follows the trail of an elusive attacker who leads them on crepuscular chases through gloomy Victorian streets and to a blood-filled room where the puzzle of his motive becomes deeper. However, Conan Doyle is occupied with other matters, as well. He's fast developing a fondness for fellow student Elsbeth Scott, whose interest in promoting educational rights for women has made her many enemies, and whose sister, the wife of a hypocritical philanthropist, grows sicker by the day--either as a result of disease or deviousness. The future author is disturbed, too, by his father's deteriorating mental condition. Assisting Bell offers Conan Doyle some release from worry--at least until their controlling quarry becomes a threat to Miss Scott. Pirie's plot only gains more perplexity and darkness as its action shifts to London, forcing the logical Bell and his impetuous amanuensis to contend with opium fiends, disappearing corpses, a severed head with "horrifying power," and continuing taunts by a murderer who believes that "evil is freedom."

While British author Pirie's previous Bell-Conan Doyle novel, The Patient's Eyes, was more of a whodunit, liberally employing Sherlockian investigative techniques, the rather more smoothly constructed The Night Calls concentrates equally on drama and the morally incongruent psychology of its principal players. This novel blends fact with fiction in a mesmerizing tale that boasts a frightening, cliffhanger ending. --J Kingston Pierce, Amazon.com

Review
Arthur Conan Doyle is the narrator of this excellent crime novel which blends fact with fiction and opens in the late 1870s with the young Doyle studying medicine at Edinburgh University. His mentor is the famous Dr Joseph Bell, who Pirie makes a Sherlock Holmes character, and his adversary against whom he is pitted in two rousing adventures is a prototype Moriarty. It would be unfair to give the game away but Doyle and Bell find themselves alone on the track of a crazed serial killer who strikes first in Edinburgh and then in London. This evocative, superbly crafted mystery thriller paints a striking picture of Victorian mores and the tight and imaginative plot is excitingly developed in a strong narrative that demands (and deserves) to be devoured at a single sitting.

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• Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Mystery
• Books > Crime, Thrillers & Mystery > Thrillers
• Books > Fiction

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