The Clockmakers Shroud

THE CLOCKMAKER'S SHROUD
A Sherlock Holmes Mystery
By Mark Collins

A widow's visit. A bent watch-hand. Three dead men. And a secret buried in the heartbeat of a clock.

When Mrs. Pelham arrives at 221B Baker Street shrouded in mourning black, she carries more than grief. Her husband - the distinguished Clerkenwell clockmaker Alderman Josiah Pelham - has been dead three weeks, his passing certified as a simple failure of the heart. But an anonymous letter and a single, strangely twisted clock-hand suggest the truth is something far darker.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are drawn into the fog-drenched backstreets of Victorian London's clockmaking quarter, where precision and secrecy are equally prized crafts. What begins as a quiet enquiry into one suspicious death quickly spirals into a conspiracy that reaches from the artisan's workbench to the corridors of Scotland Yard - and beyond, into the shadowed offices of the British Crown itself.

At the heart of it all lies the Brotherhood of the Meridian, a craftsmen's society whose noble origins have been hollowed out and turned to ruthless purpose. Its new master - the enigmatic and lethal Bartholomew Crane - controls his network not through loyalty, but through fear. And the instrument of that fear is a stolen secret so strategically devastating it could alter the balance of naval power in Europe.

With bodies accumulating and the official apparatus of justice itself compromised, Holmes must navigate a world in which no institution can be trusted and every clock face may conceal a lie. From the ticking workshops of Clerkenwell to a midnight skiff on the Thames, from the fog-shrouded courts of Southwark to a tense confrontation in a riverside house at Chiswick, The Clockmaker's Shroud delivers twenty-five chapters of high Victorian intrigue - meticulous in period detail, relentless in pace, and true in every particular to the voice and method of the world's most famous consulting detective.

Perfect for fans of Arthur Conan Doyle, Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders, and C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series.

"When the clock stopped, the killing began."

* A richly atmospheric Victorian mystery
* 25 chapters of interlocking intrigue
* Holmes and Watson at their most brilliantly matched
* A standalone novel requiring no prior knowledge of the Holmes canon