The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

At the outset of Entwistle’s less than successful second paranormal mystery for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (after 2014’s The Revenant of Thraxton Hall), Scotland Yard’s Detective Blenkinsop calls Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde to the London home of the secretary for war, Lord Montague Howell, who lies dead on the parlor floor, his evening clothes drenched with blood. Conan Doyle and Wilde follow a trail of bloody footprints out to the street, where they find the bullet-ridden corpse of a petty thief, whom Blenkinsop saw hanged a week earlier. Howell turns out to be the victim of a revolutionary plot that threatens the monarchy, which Victoria herself asks Conan Doyle to thwart. Entwistle’s Conan Doyle, a married man who’s indiscreet enough to take a new love interest to the theater, is unconvincing, and Gyles Brandreth has done a better job of portraying Wilde as a detective in a series also featuring Sherlock Holmes’s creator. Agent: Kimberley Cameron, Kimberley Cameron and Associates (June)