The Tarleton Murders

The Tarleton Murders: A corking good early Sherlock Holmes story that any mystery reader will love.

Find out the answers to many tantalizing Sherlock Holmes questions in The Tarleton Murders, the book that takes you into the dark place in the life of Sherlock Holmes B.W. (Before Watson), or, as he said, “before my biographer came to glorify me.”

Questions include:

• Who really was Moriarty?

• How did Holmes know so much about the Ku Klux Klan?

• Was Uncle Remus actually Sherlock Holmes?

• Did you know Holmes saved both General Sherman and the Pope from assassination?

• How did Holmes acquire such a rich acquaintance with America?

• Did he ever go to America?

• Did he really prevent a Second Civil War?

• And what role did he play in the families of Martin Luther King, G.K. Chesterton, Scarlett O’Hara, and Singin’ Jimmy McCartney of Liverpool?

Historical Fiction Thriller: The Tarleton Murders, the record of “one of those pretty little problems” Holmes solved in the pre-Watson years, has never been brought to light until now. The discovery of this previously unknown manuscript opens a window onto the mysterious early years when Holmes was struggling to set himself up as a “consulting detective”—a previously unknown profession. “I have often wished that I had notes of those cases,” Watson said of Holmes’s early work, and so do we! But in The Tarleton Murders we have an account written by a Watson before there was a Watson.

The Early Sherlock Holmes: An old schoolmate, now a Jesuit priest, comes to Holmes with an alarming coded message that menaces a respectable nun. So begins a frantic journey that takes Holmes and his friend from Rome (where they save the Pope) to Paris to London to Liverpool, across the Atlantic during the most dangerous hurricane in twenty years, to the backwoods of Georgia (infested by the Klan), and eventually into the midst of Atlanta’s highest society—with growing awareness of a plot that threatens the very existence of the United States. What Holmes called in his usual understated fashion “a pretty little problem” turns out to be “a pretty big problem” indeed! Along the way we encounter George Bernard Shaw, Joel Chandler Harris, Pope Leo XIII, the artist Mary Cassatt, Moriarty himself—and Moriarty’s wife! And in the midst of the fun we make some astounding discoveries, such as the true identity of Moriarty, the fate of the Vatican Cameos, and to top it all off, Mycroft’s schoolboy nickname.

The Tarleton Murders is just a corking good story that any mystery reader will love.