Book description
New York, January 1896. Arthur Conan Doyle, the renowned creator of
Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the Britannic Hotel with his wife, Louisa,
ready to begin his first American tour. While he prepares his lectures,
Louisa becomes mesmerised by this brash, vibrant, dangerous city,
especially when a woman's brutally butchered corpse is found in a Bowery
alley and Louisa is convinced from the artist's sketch in the paper that
she'd seen the victim at the hotel. Arthur is patronisingly skeptical
about her womanly 'fantasies' but when she sprains her ankle and is
forced to remain at the hotel while Arthur goes on tour, Louisa cannot
resist pursuing her intuitions. And when more bodies start appearing,
she's convinced that she holds the key to the killings. With the help of
the hotel's hard-bitten detective and an ambitious female news reporter,
Louisa starts to piece together a story of madness, murder and depravity
- a story that leads inexorably back to the hotel itself, the strange
story of its unique construction and a madman who is watching her every
move. Kenneth Cameron is the author of the Denton series, as well as
of plays staged in Britain and the US, and the award-winning AFRICA ON
FILM: BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE. He lives part of the year in northern New
York State and part in the southern US.
