The Moor

Latest in Laurie King's popular and much admired Mary Russell crime series: 'Beguiling variation on Sherlock Holmes sequels... civilized, ingenious and engrossing' - Literary Review

Rumours of a ghostly carriage and a huge 'devil dog' on a moonlit moor lead Sherlock Holmes and his wife and sleuthing partner Mary Russell back to the eerie scene of one of his most celebrated cases. And when the body of tin miner Josiah Gorton is found surrounded by oversize paw prints, it looks as if the Hound of the Baskervilles has returned to haunt Dartmoor once more.

Attempting to unravel the mystery, Holmes and Russell find themselves caught up in local legend, myth and folklore as a devilish pattern begins to develop against the backdrop of the dark, foreboding Devonshire moor. True to their expectations, events have a real-world explanation, but it is one that combines more wild emotion, surprise, and frightening suspense than any ghost story could.

Though theirs is a marriage of true equals, when Sherlock Holmes summons his wife and partner Mary Russell to the eerie scene of his most celebrated case, she abandons her Oxford studies to aid his investigation. But this time, on Dartmoor, there is more to the matter than a phantom hound. Sightings of a spectral coach carrying a long-dead noblewoman over the moonlit moor have heralded a mysterious death, the corpse surrounded by oversize paw prints. Here on this wild and foreboding moor, Russell and Holmes embark on a quest with few clues save a fanatic anthropologist, an ancestral portrait, a moorland witch, and a lowly-but most revealing-hedgehog. As Holmes and Russell anticipate, a rational explanation lies beneath the supernatural events-but one darker than they could have imagined. And one that could end their lives in this harsh and desolate land.