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Sherlock Holmes and the Vampire Invasion
A Vampire Army of Vengeance
“No blood, no teeth, and now no scullery maid. What else shall go missing? I hope we may all leave this house with our limbs.” – Mycroft Holmes
To kill for the sake of killing—to target those unknown to oneself—is the most demonic act of all. Is it a Satanic cult or a witches’ coven behind the murders? Or is the legend of “Varney the Vampire” true? Are these killings an act of greed or vengeance? Or both?
Mycroft’s exclusive Diogenes Club is targeted, with its members being found drained of all blood, their necks punctured with wolf-like teeth marks.
The vampire murderer is combing the workhouses for the most desperate and misplaced, forming a vampire army in Victorian London. Wiggins is on the case. Would a murderer who kills indiscriminately stop at children? Sherlock is aghast to learn that Mirabella has disappeared, secretly checking into a workhouse in an effort to find the vampire murderer—and the reason for these killings.
It’s the dawn of medicine when knowledge of human anatomy is almost non-existent, without which understanding there can be no surgery, no blood transfusions, and no advancement. Dead bodies are in high demand to further the needs of science. If a body were helped along to its final resting place and thereafter removed from the coffin, who was going to be the wiser?
Victorian romantic mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes, his wicked wit and cutting tongue, along with Mycroft Holmes, Dr. James Watson, Wiggins, and their female operative Mirabella Hudson.
The Great Detective In Love series on AUDIBLE.
FINALIST Chanticleer Mystery & Mayhem awards, Goethe Awards for Historical Fiction,
International Book Awards, Readers’ Choice Awards.
“No blood, no teeth, and now no scullery maid. What else shall go missing? I hope we may all leave this house with our limbs.” – Mycroft Holmes
To kill for the sake of killing—to target those unknown to oneself—is the most demonic act of all. Is it a Satanic cult or a witches’ coven behind the murders? Or is the legend of “Varney the Vampire” true? Are these killings an act of greed or vengeance? Or both?
Mycroft’s exclusive Diogenes Club is targeted, with its members being found drained of all blood, their necks punctured with wolf-like teeth marks.
The vampire murderer is combing the workhouses for the most desperate and misplaced, forming a vampire army in Victorian London. Wiggins is on the case. Would a murderer who kills indiscriminately stop at children? Sherlock is aghast to learn that Mirabella has disappeared, secretly checking into a workhouse in an effort to find the vampire murderer—and the reason for these killings.
It’s the dawn of medicine when knowledge of human anatomy is almost non-existent, without which understanding there can be no surgery, no blood transfusions, and no advancement. Dead bodies are in high demand to further the needs of science. If a body were helped along to its final resting place and thereafter removed from the coffin, who was going to be the wiser?
Victorian romantic mystery featuring Sherlock Holmes, his wicked wit and cutting tongue, along with Mycroft Holmes, Dr. James Watson, Wiggins, and their female operative Mirabella Hudson.
The Great Detective In Love series on AUDIBLE.
FINALIST Chanticleer Mystery & Mayhem awards, Goethe Awards for Historical Fiction,
International Book Awards, Readers’ Choice Awards.
307 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 20, 2018
80 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Suzette Hollingsworth
10 books34 followersSuzette loves to hear from her readers.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 31, 2018
Mary Sue run riot.
Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, and somewhere in Heaven Arthur Conan Doyle probably wishes he was in hell thanks to efforts like Sherlock Holmes and the Vampire Invasion. I confess to reading Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Some of them are very good indeed, and can satisfy a craving for more of the Master in action. Start with Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, which is to this dreck what a Porsche is to a child's scooter. Laurie King's Mary Russell series even takes the same premise as Hollingsworth's and turns it into something worth reading. King also avoids the Mary Sue trap. What is a Mary Sue? A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (and yes, I know it's Star Wars, shut it) there was a very popular television show called Star Trek. It starred William Shatner, before he became a vehicle for increasingly bad toupees, as Captain James T. Kirk, but the real mojo for the show came from Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan First Officer of the USS Enterprise. The show was canceled after three seasons, but the fanboys (raises hand), and for the purposes of this review, the fangirls, refused to let it die. The results speak for themselves.
However. One of the tactics used was to publish fanzines. This was before the internet, children, so these were printed --- or mimeographed, it was the Stone Age --- and distributed at places like comic book conventions or through the mail. It soon involved Star Trek fiction, some of which was good enough to be collected in anthologies during the early 1970s. This eventually led to a lot of original novels about the crews of the various starships that have since become canon, and more than a few that have not. Once the technology became available, there were websites and even homemade fan series/movies. Some of the fan series are good enough that the original now looks like it was shot with tinker toys.
But some of the fan fiction was very bad indeed. An early trope was to make Kirk Spock's lover, despite the fact that the series pretty much established Kirk as a sort of interplanetary one-man Love Machine for the Ladies. But it also spawned the "Mary Sue." This was a character inserted into the bridge of the Enterprise. Mary Sue was the author's stand-in. She was pretty, but not in an obvious way. She was highly intelligent, but kept it hidden until such time as her smarts were needed to save (1) Kirk (2) Spock or (3) the whole damn ship. She was unconventional in her approach to problems. Frequently, Ensign Mary Sue would wind up marooned with either the Captain or First Officer in a hostile environment. He would be wounded, and she would take charge of the situation. At the end of the story, Kirk or Spock would realize that he loved Ensign Mary Sue.
So . . . yeah. The real challenge was Spock, because of the whole Vulcan thing, but most Mary Sues were up to that stumbling block, and before you could say plomik soup, Spock and the young lady would be rubbing fingers.
I have not read the other three entries in The Great Detective in Love Series, nor do I intend to after this gem. "Mirabella Hudson" is the Mary Sue here, and frankly, she hits all of the stereotypes of such a character so hard I expected that the book had been written by a 13 year-old. Nope. Hollingsworth is a grown-up, and happily provides the pages and pages of citations for the research she did to create this mess. Why a mess? One of the reasons the Mary Russell series is a success is that the author doesn't give much from Sherlock's point of view. Hollingsworth has Sherlock vibrating like a steam engine everytime he is around Miss Bella. And this is a problem. She cannot write "Shirley" credibly. At all. And if you fundamentally cannot write the character with at least a passing acquaintance with Doyle's conception of Holmes, well . . . why bother?
Where she really drops the ball, however, aside from the ridiculous plot, is the depiction of Mycroft Holmes and the Diogenes Club. Mycroft is one of the great supporting canon characters, along with Watson, of course, and the Baker Street Irregulars. The latter two also make appearances in Sherlock Holmes and the Vampire Invasion and survive the experience more or less recognizably. Mycroft does not. I won't give away why not in fairness to anyone who might read the book. But let's just say that he calls his brother "Shirley", not once, but several times. I first assumed it was a typo. Nope. By the end, everytime he did it I was reduced to giggling. All I could hear was Leslie Nielson in Airplane.
Anyway . . . no.
Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain, and somewhere in Heaven Arthur Conan Doyle probably wishes he was in hell thanks to efforts like Sherlock Holmes and the Vampire Invasion. I confess to reading Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Some of them are very good indeed, and can satisfy a craving for more of the Master in action. Start with Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, which is to this dreck what a Porsche is to a child's scooter. Laurie King's Mary Russell series even takes the same premise as Hollingsworth's and turns it into something worth reading. King also avoids the Mary Sue trap. What is a Mary Sue? A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (and yes, I know it's Star Wars, shut it) there was a very popular television show called Star Trek. It starred William Shatner, before he became a vehicle for increasingly bad toupees, as Captain James T. Kirk, but the real mojo for the show came from Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan First Officer of the USS Enterprise. The show was canceled after three seasons, but the fanboys (raises hand), and for the purposes of this review, the fangirls, refused to let it die. The results speak for themselves.
However. One of the tactics used was to publish fanzines. This was before the internet, children, so these were printed --- or mimeographed, it was the Stone Age --- and distributed at places like comic book conventions or through the mail. It soon involved Star Trek fiction, some of which was good enough to be collected in anthologies during the early 1970s. This eventually led to a lot of original novels about the crews of the various starships that have since become canon, and more than a few that have not. Once the technology became available, there were websites and even homemade fan series/movies. Some of the fan series are good enough that the original now looks like it was shot with tinker toys.
But some of the fan fiction was very bad indeed. An early trope was to make Kirk Spock's lover, despite the fact that the series pretty much established Kirk as a sort of interplanetary one-man Love Machine for the Ladies. But it also spawned the "Mary Sue." This was a character inserted into the bridge of the Enterprise. Mary Sue was the author's stand-in. She was pretty, but not in an obvious way. She was highly intelligent, but kept it hidden until such time as her smarts were needed to save (1) Kirk (2) Spock or (3) the whole damn ship. She was unconventional in her approach to problems. Frequently, Ensign Mary Sue would wind up marooned with either the Captain or First Officer in a hostile environment. He would be wounded, and she would take charge of the situation. At the end of the story, Kirk or Spock would realize that he loved Ensign Mary Sue.
So . . . yeah. The real challenge was Spock, because of the whole Vulcan thing, but most Mary Sues were up to that stumbling block, and before you could say plomik soup, Spock and the young lady would be rubbing fingers.
I have not read the other three entries in The Great Detective in Love Series, nor do I intend to after this gem. "Mirabella Hudson" is the Mary Sue here, and frankly, she hits all of the stereotypes of such a character so hard I expected that the book had been written by a 13 year-old. Nope. Hollingsworth is a grown-up, and happily provides the pages and pages of citations for the research she did to create this mess. Why a mess? One of the reasons the Mary Russell series is a success is that the author doesn't give much from Sherlock's point of view. Hollingsworth has Sherlock vibrating like a steam engine everytime he is around Miss Bella. And this is a problem. She cannot write "Shirley" credibly. At all. And if you fundamentally cannot write the character with at least a passing acquaintance with Doyle's conception of Holmes, well . . . why bother?
Where she really drops the ball, however, aside from the ridiculous plot, is the depiction of Mycroft Holmes and the Diogenes Club. Mycroft is one of the great supporting canon characters, along with Watson, of course, and the Baker Street Irregulars. The latter two also make appearances in Sherlock Holmes and the Vampire Invasion and survive the experience more or less recognizably. Mycroft does not. I won't give away why not in fairness to anyone who might read the book. But let's just say that he calls his brother "Shirley", not once, but several times. I first assumed it was a typo. Nope. By the end, everytime he did it I was reduced to giggling. All I could hear was Leslie Nielson in Airplane.
Anyway . . . no.
May 30, 2018
If you are a fan of Holmes and Watson, you should definitely read this series by Hollingsworth. Each writer who takes on the challenge of penning a Holmes/Watson story puts their on spin on the pair but Hollingsworth truly does credit to Conan Doyle's creation. Despite the title, the plot itself is quite realistic and offers much insight into the period of history in which it takes place. I wait anxiously for the next installment in this series and plan to go back and read the preceding 3 books.
March 18, 2018
First off, historical is not my thing. But I love a good mystery. And yes, this was a good mystery. It kept me guessing and there was a lot going on to keep me interested. Great cast of characters keep the story fun. I haven’t read the others in the series, but it didn’t not hurt at all. I was able to catch on quickly. I’m looking forward to more in this series!
August 22, 2018
This fourth installment of the Sherlock Holmes mystery series by Suzette Hollingsworth is another exciting and memorable story. I love the development of Sherlock's young protege Mirabella Hudson and her interaction with both Sherlock and Dr. Watson. She continues to grow as the first female detective and she continues to make me cheer for her as she questions everything Sherlock does and says. This is an excellent mystery and detective work of art that is a must read for the mystery reader. I absolutely love this series.
June 9, 2020
Guess this is the last book in the series because the case was rapped up and it still took an hour to tie up all the lose ends between Holmes, Bella, Wiggins, and any other characters in the book.
I liked this installment more than the third because there was less Moriarty.
The author has a lot of information at the end of the book that shows what was true about the Victorian period and how she presented it in the book. I really found her explanation of the monetary system at the time most uselful. As an American, I have never understood a pound, a guinea, a farthling, a crown, a shilling, or a pence. Thanks.
I liked this installment more than the third because there was less Moriarty.
The author has a lot of information at the end of the book that shows what was true about the Victorian period and how she presented it in the book. I really found her explanation of the monetary system at the time most uselful. As an American, I have never understood a pound, a guinea, a farthling, a crown, a shilling, or a pence. Thanks.
January 19, 2021
Do not expect this to take a spot in the Holmes canon - doesn't the title give it away? This is NOT a "serious" pastiche - it's a hoot. I laughed a lot and that is what makes this a book worth reading as far as I'm concerned.
November 12, 2020
The series is perfection
It was a page Turner from start to finish, I highly recommend the series as a whole with a cup of tea and a cookie, You won't be disappointed
It was a page Turner from start to finish, I highly recommend the series as a whole with a cup of tea and a cookie, You won't be disappointed
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews