Other editions of book Tangled Skein

In The Tangled Skein, author David Stuart Davies accomplishes a creative coup by arranging the fateful meeting of two of literature's most resilient characters: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. The setting is 1888 London, shortly after The Hound of The Baskervilles case. It opens with Holmes' characteristic derisive reaction to a newspaper account of a local lecture by Amsterdam University Professor Abraham Van Helsing upon the subject of vampires. The Baker Street detective's opinions of the supernatural are quite set and intransigent. The events which proceed from this moment of contempt and disbelief, however, eventually make a believer of Holmes and of the listener to David Stuart Davies' ability to resurrect the very spirits of Holmes and Watson. A mysterious illness begins to afflict the young ladies of a finishing school for girls. Reports of children being attacked and left with bite marks upon their necks appear in the papers. From the outset, Holmes himself is stalked by an assailant whose obsessive, unmitigated hatred and cleverness may cost Holmes his life. So filled with complications is this gripping drama that the evocative title Tangled Skein could scarcely have been better suited. Portraying it all with customery style and wit is British actor David Ian Davies, whose solitary voice work weaves its own magic and allows us to enter into that place and time, beholding it all vividly in our minds, and forgetting that One Voice has captured our imaginations.

A darkly supernatural case for the famed crime-solving duo, Holmes and Watson.Professor Van Helsing is in town visiting the Royal Society to discuss the phenomenon of vampires. A horrifying encounter with something seemingly beyond this world convinces the once sceptical Holmes of the danger Helsing's foes pose.Inspector Lestrade, however, has bigger problems for Holmes — there have been murders on Hampstead Heath and there is heightened talk of a strange phantom lady. The chilling discovery that awaits them on the Heath leads them back to Devon and the bleak terrain of Dartmoor.The nightmare that is the tangled skein is now in full force. Their investigation will bring them to the true embodiment of evil, the most powerful vampire of all. David Stuart Davies is one of Britain’s leading Sherlockian writers. He was the editor of Sherlock Holmes the Detective Magazine, and is the author of several Holmes novels, the hit play Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act, and an acclaimed biography of Jeremy Brett. He is also an advisor to Granada Studios’ Sherlock Holmes museum, and he contributed commentaries to the DVD releases of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films.

It is the autumn of 1888. Following the successful conclusion of the investigation into the affair of the Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson have returned from Dartmoor, little realising that fate will see them back in Devon before the year is out. Holmes receives a potentially lethal package, the first strand in the tangled skein, which he will need to unravel before this new adventure is resolved. A threat to Holmes' life, murders on Hampstead Heath, and a strange phantom lady lead Holmes and Watson into the most dangerous investigation they have ever undertaken - an encounter which brings them face to face with evil itself, embodied in Count Dracula, the Lord of the Undead.

Following the successful conclusion of the investigation into the affair of the Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson little realise that fate will see them back in Devon before the year is out. Holmes receives a potentially lethal package, the first strand in the tangled skein which he will need to unravel before this new adventure is resolved. A threat to Holmes's life, murders on Hampstead Heath and a strange phantom lady lead Holmes and Watson into the most dangerous investigation they have ever undertaken...