No One Notices the Boys
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A murder at the hospital draws Sherlock Holmes's bedridden landlady and Dr. Watson's wife into another puzzling mystery.
Patients are dying in the hospital ward. Surely this isn't news. But to Mrs. Hudson, ill and dizzy from medication, the deaths—one patient, then another, and all of them women!—seem sinisterly connected. Even if she's the only person who sees the connection. Mary Watson knows just how she feels, though her focus is less on sick women than on missing boys—the skinny, grubby, poor ones that nobody wanted in the first place. Sherlock Holmes isn't interested in either issue; he and Dr. Watson have more important puzzles to solve. So once again, it is left to Mary and Mrs. Hudson to help the truly vulnerable, to draw lines between the dying women and the disappearing boys, and to follow those lines to their grim conclusion.
"Riveting. . . . A thrilling historical mystery novel about a woman's work to uncover the twisted nature of humanity's worst beings." —Foreword Reviews
"[A] solid sequel." —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Birkby's solid sequel to 2019's All Roads Lead to Whitechapel, Sherlock Holmes's landlady, Martha Hudson, and her best friend, Mary, Dr. Watson's wife, once again take center stage. In 1889, after the case of the Baskerville hound is solved, Martha has surgery to clear a stomach obstruction. One night, while recuperating at the hospital, she believes she witnesses the murder of a patient in an adjoining bed. When Martha wonders the next morning whether she dreamed it, Watson speculates that the painkillers she's on may have played a part. With that unresolved, Mary hands Martha another mystery—boys have gone missing from the streets of London for decades without anyone apparently noticing, their disappearances possibly connected to the legendary Pale Boys, who are rumored to never grow old, eat, or drink. The vague nature of the evidence leads the pair to investigate on their own. Sherlockians won't mind that Birkby alters the story of the Baskerville hound to make Holmes more rattled by the creature than he was in Conan Doyle's telling. This is a significant improvement over the first book in the series.
