The Adventure of the Wych Elm Coffin - The Sherlock Holmes Series, #2

When a small black coffin is discovered tangled among the roots of an ancient wych elm at Maberley Court, the household is quick to whisper of an old family curse. Inside the coffin lie no bones, but a woman's glove, a child's silver rattle, and a funeral notice dated only three days before.

By morning, Sir Gideon Maberley is dead beneath the tree, his hand marked with wax and black silk caught beneath his nail. To Scotland Yard, the answer may lie in fear, scandal, or family resentment. To Sherlock Holmes, the truth lies in the details no ghost would trouble to arrange: foreign soil, old nursery dust, a false paper trail, and a sound in the wind that only seems to weep.

With Dr. Watson at his side, Holmes follows the clues from the rain-soaked lawns of Surrey to a shuttered nursery, a parish register, and the accounts of a steward who has kept more than books in order. But when the past begins to speak, it reveals not a haunting, but a crime buried for twenty years, and a murderer desperate enough to kill again to keep it hidden.

A darkly atmospheric Sherlock Holmes pastiche for readers who enjoy gothic country-house mysteries, Victorian secrets, rational deduction, and eerie legends stripped bare by the keenest mind in London.