The Hypnotist of Fleet Street
A Sherlock Holmes Mystery - by Mark Collins
London, 1889. A bank clerk wakes to find diamonds in his pocket. A clergyman strikes his oldest friend without warning. A grieving widow is branded a thief in her best friend's house - and not one of them remembers doing a thing.
When Sherlock Holmes takes up the strange case of Josiah Hartwell - a mild-mannered clerk arrested with a fortune in stolen diamonds and no memory of how they came to be in his coat - he expects an ordinary mystery of theft and alibi. What he finds instead is something far more unsettling: a pattern of respectable Londoners committing crimes utterly out of character, each one preceded by a curious drowsiness, each one followed by a wall of blankness where memory should be.
The trail leads to Fleet Street, and to the elegant consulting rooms of Dr. Ambrose Vane, a physician of impeccable reputation whose "restful treatments" have soothed the nerves of half of fashionable London. Holmes soon discovers that Vane's true gift lies not in healing minds, but in commanding them - planting suggestions so deep, and triggers so subtle, that his unwitting subjects become the perfect instruments of crimes they will never remember and can never be justly punished for.
As Holmes and Watson trace the doctor's reach through a bank clerk's ruin, a clergyman's disgrace, and a widow's stolen honour, they uncover a conspiracy with far higher stakes: a fortune, a disputed will, and an innocent woman being quietly, patiently prepared to destroy the friend she loves best - with no more knowledge of her fate than a sleepwalker has of the edge of a cliff.
But Dr. Vane has learned a great deal about his pursuers, too. And when he turns his extraordinary and terrible art directly upon Sherlock Holmes - and upon the one man Holmes trusts beyond all others - the detective must find a way to resist an enemy who does not need to raise a hand, or even show his face, to strike his killing blow.
A gripping, atmospheric Sherlock Holmes mystery set in the fog-bound streets of Victorian London, THE HYPNOTIST OF FLEET STREET is a novel of hidden minds, buried commands, and the terrifying question of how well any of us can truly answer for our own actions.
Perfect for fans of classic detective fiction, Gothic Victorian atmosphere, and mysteries that ask not just whodunit, but who was truly in control
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