The Adventure of the Khartoum Cipher: A Sherlock Holmes novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798181332379)

November 1898. A decorated veteran of the Sudan campaign is found dead in a locked Whitehall office - no wound, no struggle, only a strip of Arabic parchment clutched in his hand and an expression of terror frozen on his face. The official verdict is heart failure. Sherlock Holmes knows better.

The parchment carries a cipher. When Holmes decodes it, the message is stark: six coordinates marking the route of a thanksgiving procession scheduled for the seventeenth of November, at which both the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army will be present. Nine days away.

The dead man, Major Reginald Ashby, had been running an unsanctioned surveillance operation - alone, without official support - tracking a cell of Mahdist operatives who had followed Kitchener's army back to England from the plains of Omdurman. His report had been submitted through the correct channels. It had been classified and buried within forty-eight hours.

Now Ashby is dead, his intelligence suppressed, and the cell is still in London.

Holmes and Watson have nine days to find them.

The investigation takes them from the fog-shrouded docks of Wapping to the smoke-filled coffee houses of Stepney, from the ordnance workshops of Woolwich Arsenal to a cellar in Limehouse three streets from the river - where, on the night of the sixteenth of November, everything will be decided.

The Adventure of the Khartoum Cipher is a full-length Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in the aftermath of the Battle of Omdurman, combining the authentic Victorian atmosphere of the original stories with a mystery rooted in the intelligence failures, imperial anxieties, and quiet heroism of the age. For readers of Arthur Conan Doyle, Anthony Horowitz, and David Stuart Davies.

Edited from the papers of Dr. John H. Watson, M.D., by S Humphreys.