The Minnesota Mysteries

In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe. When experts arrive to open the safe and examine its contents, they make an astonishing discovery. There, inside, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, MD. The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist - known only as the Red Demon - who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

The year is 1896, and the magnificent winter carnival is under way in St. Paul, Minnesota, when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city's most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man has disappeared on the eve of his wedding - and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival's ice palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case.

Sherlock Holmes is bored between cases at 221B Baker Street. So when King Oskar II of Sweden - who has heard of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone by a farmer in Minnesota - asks to engage his services, Holmes jumps at the chance to decipher the runes and determine whether the find is real or a hoax. With Dr. John H. Watson by his side, faithfully recording every detail, Holmes makes his way to Minnesota for a third time.

As the city of Minneapolis prepares for a visit from President William McKinley, someone else prepares for murder. On the day before the visit, a union activist is found hanged, naked, outside a ruined mansion. A placard around his neck reads "THE SECRET ALLIANCE HAS SPOKEN." Who is the alliance? What does it want? How was the victim involved with the city's corrupt mayor? And why did he possess a photograph of a prominent citizen in a compromising position?

A letter, written in a secret cipher he recognizes all too well, reveals that an old foe of Holmes - a murderer he once captured after an incredible duel of wits - is back, has kidnapped his previous victim’s widow, and is now impersonating Holmes himself. Holmes must once again match wits with a particularly cunning adversary, one whose hatred of Holmes has seemingly become the killer’s single greatest obsession.

St. Paul, Minnesota. October 1, 1917. High above the city, a renowned local financier named Artemis Dodge lies facedown on the floor of his armored penthouse sanctuary, a single bullet hole in his head. Thirty stories up, in the city’s tallest building, and not a shred of evidence or sign pointing to anyone having broken into the wealthy man’s fortress. It is - to all appearances - an impossible crime.

Dogged by depression, doubt, and - as a trip to the Mayo Clinic has revealed - emphysema, 66-year-old Sherlock Holmes is preparing to return to England when he receives a shock: a note slipped under his hotel room door, from a vicious murderer he'd nearly captured in Munich in 1892. The murderer, known as the Monster of Munich, announces that he has relocated to Eisendorf, a tiny village near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case, the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty’s death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world’s most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend’s killer.