SHERLOCK HOLMES - GOOD MEN GONE BAD
The deadliest weapon in London is a children's rhyme.
And it's a kill list.
Sherlock Holmes hears it first in the gutters of Spitalfields: a sing-song nursery rhyme the street children chant without knowing what it means.
"Good Man Gone Bad...
He drank the gin...
Then came the sin..."
To Holmes, it is no rhyme at all. It is a clue. As the body count climbs and the trail twists from a poisoner's laboratory to the gilded clubs of the powerful, Holmes and Watson close on a conspiracy that sells the ruin of honest men to the highest bidder - and behind it, in the shadows, waits the one mind in England equal to Holmes's own.
The Professor has a list. Watson's name may be on it.
A Brand New Sherlock Holmes mystery thriller of poison, corruption, and the thin line between a good man and a damned one.
GOOD MEN GONE BAD is a new standalone Sherlock Holmes mystery novel - a Victorian crime thriller and detective whodunit set in foggy 1895 London.
London, 1895. One by one, the capital's most upright men - a Chancery judge, a Scotland Yard superintendent, a great City banker - are falling. Not to a knife in the fog, but to something slower and far more terrible: their hair thinning, their hands shaking, their speech slurring, their reputations rotting into public scandal. Society whispers of secret vice. The obituaries record intemperance and nervous collapse. The law looks away in disgust.
Sherlock Holmes sees what everyone else has missed. These men are not sinning - they are being poisoned, dosed for weeks with a slow toxin that murders the reputation before it kills the man, so that no one thinks to call it murder at all. And the poison is being sold - as a service - by a respectable charity for the "reclamation of fallen gentlemen," to clients who pay to have a rival quietly ruined.
There is no ledger of the crimes. The only record is a creepy street-rhyme, taught to illiterate slum children who sing it for pennies - a kill-list hidden where no one can read it. To save the last three names on that list, Watson must nurse a dying judge through the poison hour by hour while Holmes decodes the rhyme, breaks a murder-brokerage, and confronts the one mind cold enough to treat killing as accountancy: Professor Moriarty.
The clues are all on the page - sung aloud from the first chapter. Can you hear the names before Holmes does?
Perfect for readers who love Sherlock Holmes books, Agatha Christie fair-play murder mysteries, Anthony Horowitz thrillers (Magpie Murders, Moriarty, The House of Silk), and Dan Brown conspiracy page-turners.
Ideal for fans of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Moriarty, Irene Adler, Victorian gothic crime fiction, historical mysteries, and cat-and-mouse detective thrillers.
