Books published by publisher The Mysterious Press

The astonishing debut of Sherlock Holmes and his partner in detection, Dr. WatsonShot in the shoulder and brought to death’s door by typhoid fever, Dr. John Watson is sent home from the second Afghan war with a small income and nothing to do but recover his health. By his own account, he leads a meaningless existence in London until a chance encounter with an old friend brings news of comfortable lodgings on Baker Street. In a hospital laboratory, Watson meets his potential new roommate for the first time. “How are you?” asks Mr. Sherlock Holmes. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” With that remarkable feat of observation, one of literature’s greatest partnerships is born. In their first case, Holmes and Watson set off for an abandoned flat in Lauriston Gardens. An American has been found dead, his body unmarked, a mysterious word—Rache—spelled out in blood on the wall. Scotland Yard thinks the murderer meant to write the name Rachel, but Holmes knows better. When the dead man’s private secretary turns up stabbed through the heart, the same word scrawled nearby, it is up to the world’s only consulting detective and his eager companion to find a killer whose lust for revenge has spanned two continents and dozens of years. This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

George MacDonald Fraser was renowned for his legendary Flashman series featuring the incorrigible knave Harry Flashman, a soldier in the British army. After Fraser's death, his children discovered an unpublished first novel locked away in his study: Captain in Calico. In this lively stand-alone, Fraser introduces the real-life antihero Captain John Rackham. Called Calico Jack, he was the first to fly the skull and crossbones on a black flag, an illustrious eighteenth-century pirate who marauded the perilous Caribbean seas.One tranquil evening in the Bahamas, Calico Jack, wanted on counts of piracy, makes a surprise appearance at the governor's residence and asks for a pardon for his men. When Jack last set sail from the Bahamas two years prior, he left behind a beautiful fiancee he hopes to win back. A deal is brokered, but what the governor does not reveal is that while Jack was off looting the Spaniards, his beloved has become betrothed to a new man—the governor himself. Jack discovers he has been deceived and, in a fury, publicly threatens the governor, then locks swords with a notorious Frenchman outside a pub. All seems lost until a buxom Irishwoman, Anne Bonney, comes to his rescue and sets about planning one of the most audacious lootings the Caribbean has ever seen.

When young Harry Collins finds the mutilated body of a black woman bound to a tree with barbed wire, he and his younger sister suspect the legendary Goat Man, who is said to lurk under the swinging bridge crossing Texas's Sabine River. The creature holds the key to a string of brutal murders--and a chilling truth. A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year".