THE HAUNTING OF TORRE ABBEY

Another episode in a series resurrecting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (The Star of India, 1997). Here, Holmes receives

a plea for help from Lord Charles Cary of Torre Abbey in Devon. Cary’s widowed mother, Marion, and high-strung sister, Elizabeth, had sent for him to return from Oxford after Elizabeth fainted on seeing a headless man in a monk’s robe in the upper hall of the abbey. When Cary, on his return, sees the same ghostly figure in the courtyard, he summons Holmes, who, with a willing Watson, travels to Devon. There they meet the beautiful widow, a jittery Elizabeth, and the staff: elderly, superefficient butler Grayson; housemaid Annie; cook Sally Gubbins; and her retarded teenage son, William. A series of strange events follow—Marion kneeling at the gravestone marked Christopher Leganger, the sound of screams in the night, an unproductive séance—all climaxed by the death of Sally, supposedly of a heart attack. Other deaths follow before Holmes brings a killer into the open. Lovers of the Holmes canon will feel they’ve unearthed a treasure, so successfully is Doyle’s style and atmosphere

reproduced in this constantly absorbing story. First-class work.