Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows
The First of The Cthulhu Casebooks
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4.3 • 32 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson battle the denizens of Cthulhu in this “pitch-perfect” Lovecraft-Conan Doyle mashup from a New York Times bestselling author (Guardian).
It is the autumn of 1880, and Dr. John Watson has just returned from Afghanistan. Badly injured and desperate to forget a nightmarish expedition that left him doubting his sanity, Watson is close to destitution when he meets the extraordinary Sherlock Holmes, who is investigating a series of deaths in the Shadwell district of London.
Several bodies have been found—the victims appearing to have starved to death over the course of several weeks—and yet they were reported alive and well mere days before. Moreover, there are disturbing reports of creeping shadows that inspire dread in any who stray too close. Holmes deduces a connection between the deaths and a sinister drug lord who is seeking to expand his criminal empire.
Yet both he and Watson are soon forced to accept that there are forces at work far more powerful than they could ever have imagined. Forces that can be summoned, if one is brave—or mad—enough to dare.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Lovegrove (Sherlock Holmes: The Thinking Engine) attempts a thorough revision of the canon in this trilogy kickoff, but fails to effectively blend the world of the uber-rational Holmes with that of Lovecraft's cosmic horrors. In a prologue, Watson admits that in his previously recounted stories he has constructed "a shell of artifice around a dark, rotten kernel so as to protect civilisation from certain facts that would throw its cosy self-assurance into drastic and lasting disarray." He begins with an altered account of his first meeting with Holmes; the pair actually met in 1880 in a seedy back alley London pub when Watson's well-intentioned intervention in a violent confrontation involving an old colleague, Dr. Valentine Stamford, disrupted a disguised Holmes's surveillance of the man. Holmes suspects Stamford of being behind a series of gruesome murders that have left the victims' corpses desiccated. After Holmes has a terrifying supernatural encounter, Watson reveals the true circumstances of how he was wounded in Afghanistan, and the pair team up. Action, rather than ratiocination, dominates, and the writing is uneven.
