Sherlock Holmes and The Midnight Departure (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184481043)

The locked compartment. The overnight express. The man who should not have been there.

When Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson arrive at Edinburgh Waverley on an October morning in 1895, they find Inspector Lestrade waiting on the platform with an impossible problem: Sir Edmund Carver, chairman of the Midland and Northern Railway Company, has been found dead in a locked first-class compartment of the overnight express from Euston. The compartment was locked from the inside. The train made no unscheduled stops. No one on board admits to knowing him.

The case has no obvious beginning and no shortage of suspects - a composed widow collecting documents she should not have requested, a frightened solicitor who accepted a commission he knew was wrong, a retired colonel whose ring tells a different story from his words, and a man on the manifest listed only as J. Morrow, commercial, whose name makes Holmes pause in a way Watson has learned to notice.

As Holmes works his way back through the journey - reconstructing the hours of darkness mile by mile, from the platform at Euston to the Carlisle stop where someone asked a railway guard the precise time - the true shape of the crime emerges: not a crime of passion, but a plan of remarkable patience and precision, three years in the making, with forty-two thousand pounds at its heart and a murdered man at its end.

Sherlock Holmes and The Midnight Departure is a novel of railway murder, corporate fraud, and Holmesian deduction at its most methodical. Told in Watson's characteristic voice, with the locked-room problem at its centre and a grand assembly of principals at its close, it stands in the tradition of the best of the Canon: atmosphere, ingenuity, and a solution that earns its revelation.

The fifth novel in the series edited by S Humphreys from the manuscript papers of Dr John H. Watson.