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Nelson Pahl's award-winning love story, Bee Balms & Burgundy, in high-quality, multi-cast audiobook. Chapter #4 sample excerpt.

The Adventure of The Lion's Mane opens in Sussex in the summer of 1907 as the detective is enjoying his retirement by the seaside. As Holmes and his good friend Harold Stackhurst exchange warm greetings on this July morning, a well known science master, Fitzroy McPherson, suddenly staggers up from the beach and collapses. Within minutes he is dead, his body savagely raked by livid 'lashing' marks, such as those inflicted by a wire scourge. His dying words, the Lion's Mane" begin Holmes' search for the savage, merciless killer.

Holmes is retained by a mysterious client, through an intermediary, to rescue the daughter of a titled man from the clutches of a murderous but charismatic criminal, who seems to have irretrievably won her heart. In doing so, Holmes places himself at great personal risk as he searches for the means to expose Baron von Gruner before it is too late...

In this adventure we are at last introduced to Sherlock Holmes's brother Mycroft, the only relative of whom Watsons's friend has ever openly spoken during their long assocation. Mycroft, says Sherlock Holmes, is Sherlock's superior in intelligence and observation but cannot put the gifts to practical use. They stroll to the singular accomodations of the Diogenes Club, and as Dr. Watson becomes acquainted with the elder Holmes, Mycroft introduces them to a Grecian interpreter. The man's bizarre story draws the detective and his companion into a case of extortion, kidnapping, fraud, cruelty and violence.

One wretched November night, Inspector Stanley Hopkins comes to see Holmes at 221B Baker Street to tell him of a murder that defies solution. The dead man is Willoughby Smith, secretary to Professor Coram, an old invalid. The murder happened at Yoxley Old Place near Chatham, Kent. The most perplexing thing about the case to Hopkins is that it is apparently motiveless. Willoughby Smith seems to have nothing untoward in his background, and not an enemy in the world. He was the third secretary to the professor, the former ones not having worked out. The murder weapon was a sealing-wax knife belonging to the professor.

In his college days, Holmes spends a month with his only friend, Victor Trevor, at the Trevor estate in Norfolk. While there, Holmes amazes his host, Victor's father, who had been a Justice of the Peace and a landowner besides. He had made his fortune in the goldfields in Australia. Among Holmes's deductions, the young detective discovers that the elder Trevor had once been connected to someone with the initials J. A. whom he now wishes to forget. At this point, Trevor passes out on the table. It seems that Holmes has broached upon a touchy subject. When the older man comes to, he relates how J. A. had been an old lover. Holmes views the elder Trevor's explanation with skepticism.

On January 4, 1885 Elias's brother Joseph receives a letter postmarked Dundee with the initials "K.K.K" and instructions to leave papers on the sundial. Despite his sons urging, Joseph Openshaw refuses to call the police. Three days later, Joseph Openshaw is found dead in a chalk-pit.

In his narration, Dr. Watson notes that this is only one of two cases which he personally brought to the attention of Sherlock Holmes. The story, set in 1889, mainly consists of a London hydraulic engineer, Mr. Victor Hatherley, recounting strange happenings of the night before, first to Dr. Watson who dresses the stump where Mr. Hatherley's thumb has been cut off, and then to Sherlock Holmes himself. Hatherley is visited in his office by an odd, suspicious man who identifies himself as Colonel Lysander Stark. He offers Hatherley a job at a country house to examine a hydraulic press used, as Stark explains, to compress fuller's earth into bricks, but Stark warns Hatherley to hold his tongue about the lucrative job, which will apparently pay 50 guineas (£52 10s, or £52.50 by today's decimalised system). Hatherley feels compelled to take this work, despite his misgivings, as he has had very little work.

The story itself begins, typically enough, with a murder - the Park Lane Mystery, the seemingly motiveless killing of Mr. Ronald Adair, son of a high colonial official. The authorities, not to mention the man's family, are perplexed by the case: it seems that the Honourable Ronald Adair hadn't an enemy in the world. He was in his sitting room, with a window open, working on accounts of some kind, as indicated by the papers and money found by police. Ronald liked playing whist and regularly did so at several clubs, but never for great sums of money. It does, however, come out that he won as much as £420 in partnership with a Colonel Moran.

Watson lays out the truth behind the infamous Cornish Horror case, which begins in 1897 as Holmes is recuperating from a grueling onslaught of difficult cases. A gathering at the villa at Tredannick Wartha is discovered in disarray, some dead, the others driven mad, seeming at the sight of something so horrible their minds could not withstand what their eyes beheld...

The strange behavior of a family dog towards its master brings Holmes into a case involving the increasingly odd and disturbing behavior of the man himself, a respected professor. Mr. Trevor Bennett comes to Holmes with a most unusual problem. He is Professor Presbury's personal secretary, and until recently he has enjoyed the old Camford physiologist's implicit trust as though he were a close member of the family. Mr. Bennett is also engaged to the professor's only daughter, Edith...

When a young governess, unemployed and desperate for a position, accepts a job with a couple living in a remote country home, her positive first impressions of the man and his family begin to change. With a mixure of fear and uncertainty, she asks Sherlock Holmes to investigate the increasingly disturbing events that have begun to unfold around her.

Quite a stir is caused in Croydon when a 50-year-old spinster, Miss Susan Cushing, receives a parcel in the post which turns out to contain two severed human ears packed in coarse salt. The indefatigable though unimaginative Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard suspects a prank by three medical students whom Miss Cushing was forced to evict, owing to their unruly behaviour.

The monotony of pea-soup-fog-shrouded London is broken by a sudden visit from Holmes’s brother Mycroft. He has come about some missing, secret submarine plans. Seven of the ten pages — three are still missing — were found with Arthur Cadogan West’s body. He was a young clerk in a government office at Woolwich Arsenal whose body was found next to the Underground tracks near Aldgate, his head crushed. He had little money with him (although there appears to have been no robbery), theatre tickets, and curiously, no Underground ticket. The three missing pages by themselves could enable one of Britain’s enemies to build a Bruce-Partington submarine.

When a young man's recent comrade-in-arms becomes strangely inaccessible, Sherlock Holmes comes to his aid. But the more deeply the detective investigates the missing man's whereabouts, the more adament become the measures of his immediate family to block all attempts to communicate with the soldier's friend. The father insists his son has left on a trip around the world, and the people in the surrounding town seem to support the father's story. But there is something amiss, and Holmes shall get to the truth, whatever the consequences.

A banker, Mr. Alexander Holder of Streatham makes a loan of £50,000 to a socially prominent client, who leaves the Beryl Coronet — one of the most valuable public possessions in existence — as security. Holder feels that he must not leave this rare and precious piece of jewellery in his personal safe at the bank, and so he takes it home with him to lock it up there. He is awoken in the night by a noise, enters his dressing room, and is horrified to see his son Arthur with the coronet in his hands, apparently trying to bend it. Holder's niece Mary comes at the sound of all the shouting and, seeing the damaged coronet, faints dead away. Three beryls are missing from it. In a panic, he travels to see Holmes, who agrees to take the case.

Evidence of murder, ransacked ancient mummies, giving away a beloved dog, and a horse race upon which a man's life and future depend are just four of the elements of this Holmes story, making it one of the most memorable (and chilling) cases in the Sherlockian Canon. Head trainer John Mason from Shoscombe Old Place, a racing stable in Berkshire, comes to Holmes about his master, Sir Robert Norberton. Mason thinks he has gone mad. Sir Robert’s sister, Lady Beatrice Falder owns Shoscombe, but it will revert to her late husband’s brother when she dies. The stable has a horse, Shoscombe Prince, who Sir Robert hopes will win the Derby. He would be out of debt if that actually happened.

The beginnings starts with World War One and opens with the clandestined meeting between agents of the German Empire -- one a sleeper who has established himself in England for the purpose of gathering military intelligence, one the chief secretary of the legation, here to collect that intelligence that will lead to the invasion and overthrow of England. These are details which will compromise civil defense, British weapons, coastal defenses, and military forces. The impending meeting with an anti-British American of Irish descent shall complete their plans for a successful invasion of the British Isles that will help bring the free world under German domination. This topical, suspenseful story is one of the most intense Holmes stories written by the master, A. Conan Doyle, and will have the listener holding their breath for the startling conclusion.

Holmes wakes Dr. Watson up early one morning to rush to a murder scene at the Abbey Grange near Chislehurst. Sir Eustace Brackenstall has been killed, apparently by a gang of burglars. Inspector Stanley Hopkins believes that it was the well-known Randall gang, a father and two sons. Upon arrival at the Abbey Grange, Lady Brackenstall is found resting with a purple swelling over one eye, the result of a blow during the foregoing night’s business. There are also two red spots on her arm. Her maid later tells Holmes that Sir Eustace inflicted those with a hatpin. Lady Brackenstall tells Holmes that her marriage was not happy. Sir Eustace Brackenstall was a violent, abusive alcoholic. Moreover, Lady Brackenstall found it hard to adjust to life in England after the freedom that she enjoyed in her native Australia, which she left only 18 months ago. She was married for about a year. The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

One of the most dangerous classes in the world," says Holmes, "is the drifting and friendless woman. And Lady Frances Carfax is such, and who has fallen into the clutches of a phony preacher." Holmes sends Dr. Watson to Lausanne to investigate Lady Frances Carfax’s disappearance. Holmes is too busy in London. Lady Frances is a lone, unwed woman denied a rich inheritance because of her sex. She does, however, carry valuable jewels with her. It is also her habit to write to her old governess, Miss Dobney, every other week, but for the past five weeks, there has not been a word from her. She has left the Hôtel National for parts unknown. Her last two bank transactions were cheques, one to pay her hotel bill, and another for £50 to her maid, Miss Marie Devine. In Switzerland, Watson finds out that Lady Frances stayed at the Hôtel International for several weeks, but then suddenly left in a hurry one day. Only one witness could suggest an explanation, one involving a big, bearded man who kept hounding her. It also emerges that Lady Frances’s maid has left her employ, although it is not known why.

Holmes is brought into the investigation of what appears a simple, obvious case of a son murdering his father shortly after the son was seen by witnesses near, and at, the scene of the man's death. Set in 1888, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called down to Boscombe Valley (a fictitious place in Herefordshire) to investigate the death of Mr. Charles McCarthy. Lestrade, a detective from Scotland Yard whose meagre abilities are often upstaged by Holmes's brilliant deductions, has concluded without much ado that it is a murder, and that McCarthy's son James is the killer. James was seen by one witness following his father to the nearby pond, and another, a young girl, saw the two remonstrating with each other by the pond. Holmes will not accept Lestrade's conclusions, however, as there are some facts that simply do not seem to fit. Whom was McCarthy going to the pond to meet? He had told his serving-man that he had to keep an appointment there, from which he never came back alive.

Forest Row in the Weald is the scene of a gruesome harpoon murder, and a young police inspector, Stanley Hopkins, asks Holmes, whom he greatly admires as a mentor, for some help. Holmes has already determined that it would take a great deal of strength and skill to run a man through with a harpoon and embed it in the wall behind him besides. Peter Carey, the 50-year-old victim and former master of the Sea Unicorn of Dundee, was a most unpleasant man, especially when he was drunk. He had a reputation for being violent, even having been prosecuted once for assaulting the local vicar. His daughter is actually glad that he is dead. She and her mother have endured years of abuse from the old whaler and sealer, who moreover had some remarkably peculiar habits. He did not sleep in the family house, but in an outhouse that he built some distance from the house, and which he decorated to look like a sailor’s cabin on a ship. This is where he was found harpooned. Hopkins could find no footprints or other physical evidence.

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