The Dead Assassin ― The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

1895. Victorian England trembles on the verge of hysteria. 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… and programmed for murder.

VAUGHN ENTWISTLE grew up in Northern England. He completed a Master’s Degree at Oakland University, and in the early nineties he moved to Seattle to work as a writer. In his spare time he ran a successful gargoyle-sculpting company. He often writes with one cat on his lap, a Brittany lying across his feet, and one or more cats sauntering across the keyboard. He recently moved back to England, where he lives in North Somerset.