Holmes, Watson reunited once more

April, 1905. Revisiting his old Baker Street quarters on a whim, Dr. John Watson is surprised to see his old friend, Sherlock Holmes, lurking about inside. Surely Holmes has retired, gone off to Sussex to study bees?

As it turns out, a most interesting case has brought Holmes back to London. And he needs Watson’s help.

The Debutante Detective (Titan Books, 288 pages, $25) by Bruce Rule is the latest instalment in the excellent Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series (there have been about a dozen of them already).

Its story is carefully crafted — it involves Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of the American president, and a possible plot against Mr. Roosevelt — the characters are beautifully drawn, the writing superb.

Rule never seems like he’s trying to imitate Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, but if you’re familiar with the original Holmes stories, you’ll feel right at home here. Publishes in paperback Tuesday.

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In The Last Ferry Out (Ballantine, 336 pages, $29) by Andrea Bartz, Abby returns to the small island community where her fiancée, Eszter, died. As painful as it is, she needs to find a way to come to terms with her loss.

Among a group of Americans now living on the island, she finds a man who says he can tell her the truth about what happened — but before he can go into details, he vanishes without a trace. And no one seems to notice, or care, that he’s gone.

Desperate to uncover the truth about Eszter’s death, Abby tries to find out what happened to the missing American man. What she discovers chills her to the bone. Is it possible the person who killed her fiancée is right here, among this small community, and has killed again to keep their identity a secret? Can she expose the killer without becoming just another missing tourist?

Bartz keeps us guessing right to the end, and then surprises us with something we absolutely did not see coming.

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Joe’s not entirely comfortable with what he does for a living. The money is good, sure, and he likes being in charge of things, but the Company’s almost paranoid obsession with secrecy is a little hard to handle sometimes.

And what the Company does, the uses to which it puts its human subjects, is distasteful in the extreme. It feels like eventually, inevitably, something’s going to go wrong, and then chaos will follow.

Intercepts (Crown, 304 pages, $27) by T.J. Payne takes a traditional science fiction premise — the ability of a human being to read the thoughts of another — and gives it a horrific twist.

Originally published independently in 2019 and now reissued by a major publisher, it’s a dark, fast-paced novel, a gut-punch of a story that’ll have you frantically flipping the pages to see what horrors are yet to come. Hardcore horror fans: if you haven’t already read this one, you really must.

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Riley Sager’s With a Vengeance (Dutton, 400 pages, $27) has a deceptively simple setup: Anna Matheson invites a small group of people to take a cross-country trip on a luxury train (this is in the 1950s, when “luxury train” really meant something). But soon the questions begin to appear: Who is Anna? How does she know these people? Do they know each other? Why are they all here?

Sager answers these questions and a lot more, but in his own good time, and no earlier than he absolutely has to. It turns out Anna has a good, if rather frightening, reason for gathering these people in one place, but it seems as though unexpected complications will keep her from putting her plan into action…. unless the “unexpected” complications aren’t so unexpected after all.

Just how fiendishly clever is Anna, anyway? Or, to put it another way: how crazy is she? Another top-flight thriller from a master of the genre.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.