"The Italian secretary" by Caleb Carr (Little, Brown, 2005)

A Sherlock Holmes story.

Holmes and Watson are called to Hollyrood, Edinburgh. There's been 2 recent murders - Sinclair (an architect of historical building) and McKay (a plasterer). In the time of Mary (Queen of Scots), David Rizzio was killed in the same way - multiple stabbing. The train they take is attacked by a Nationalist Scot and a bomb thrown into their carriage. They defuse it and later meet Mycroft who tells them that 9 attempts have been made to kill the Queen, all by young men whose pistols were loaded with wadges of newspaper. One man, Alec Morton, escaped, last seen in Bremen - are the Germans behind the assassination attempts? Mycroft regularly talks to the Queen, who's at Balmoral. He leaves.

They stay at Holyroodhouse, lived in by Lord Francis. There's a skeleton staff which includes Hackett, a butler with a badly fitted glass eye and Robert, a ghillie. They examine McKay's body - so many bone breakages that it's floppy. They find a young girl, a niece of Hackett's, pregnant thanks to Will Sadler (brother of the ghillie). They hear a ghost. The niece says that someone gets money by doing ghost tours for tourists. Holmes and Watson book a place on a tour, finding out that the Sadler brothers organise them.

They discover that Lord Francis and Will run the tours, Robert an unwilling aide. The money they've earned is hidden in the haunted wing, in a mattress. The Nationalist Scot was the Lord in disguise. Mycroft (away with the Lord at Balmoral, where the Queen is), is at risk. Mycroft returns. He and Sherlock conclude that the 2 murders were to do with covering up the tours, and that the assassinations weren't orchestrated - they were copy-cat crimes. Will and the Lord would suspect by now that Sherlock is onto them and would attack. Sherlock has insufficient evidence against them for the murders. They prepare for an attack in the night.

A window's smashed. A crossbow bolt flies in with a note on it. They want their money back. A flaming body launched by a trebuchet hits the house. It's a security guard, his bones smashed by the impact. Police arrive. Perhaps a ghost appears, perhaps in the form of a goshawk. The girl escapes, jumping from a window, caught in a blanket.

Enough plot for a novella. Too many words.

Other reviews

• Tac Anderson
• krauser pua (For the first thirty or so pages it appeared promising as his prose style imitates the vocabulary and verbosity of Conan Doyle’s Watson but then it all starts to fall apart. ... It takes Carr fully three pages to convey the action of walking up a staircase and reaching the Queen’s old room. It should’ve taken one paragraph. This is painfully slow writing made all the worse that it’s utterly boring and none of the added details does anything to add richness to the scene, the characters, or the plot. The only deduction is Holmes recognising the face of a man he meets, a couple of hours after the same man stared right into his face but had a red beard. ... He finds out about the plot because they stumble into a girl who tells them the full story.)
• Colin Greenland (In the crowded field of Holmesian pastiche, Carr's characterisation is outstanding. ... Unfortunately, he's not such an admirable narrator. ... Though Carr's version reproduces superbly the peculiar éclat of Holmes's often absurd but spectacularly correct "deductions", he's a terrible windbag. The mystery isn't much of a mystery, and it's interrupted far too much by explanations of things Doyle could take as read: who Mary Queen of Scots was, for instance.)