The Burials of Sherlock Holmes

Being a Sixth Collection of Cases from the Journals of Dr. John H. Watson

The crime is buried. The city is built on top of it. Holmes works downward.

A ledger found in a condemned Shoreditch tenement — sealed behind a bricked wall with the body of the man who compiled it. A baby farmer's ledger records twenty-seven names over thirteen years — each in a neat hand, each death certified by the same doctor. An engineer who certified the Tay Bridge specifications as sound, traced to Canada three years after the disaster.

Dr. Watson chronicles eleven investigations into what Victorian London has buried — the culverted river, the sealed ward, the demolished rookery, the record that was never made. Holmes reads the physical city as a document: the bricked passage, the subdivided floor, the wall that was never a wall. The evidence was here all along. No one thought to ask it the right questions.

The crime is underground. Holmes brings it to the surface. Whether the surface, once it knows, does anything about it — that is a different investigation entirely.

The Burials of Sherlock Holmes is the sixth volume in The Sherlock Holmes Casebooks — original short story collections in the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle, set in late Victorian London.

Also in the series: The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes, The Darker Reaches of Sherlock Holmes, The Blind Spots of Sherlock Holmes, The Fabrications of Sherlock Holmes, and The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes.