Castle Rouge

Irene Adler #6

by Carole Nelson Douglas

IRENE ADLER

Operatic diva. Femme fatale. Adventuress.

And one of the world's most intriguing detectives.

Before Caleb Carr, Anne Perry, and Laurie R. King, Carole Nelson Douglas gave readers a delightful look into Victoriana with one of the most impressive detective characters: Irene Adler, the only woman ever to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes, in "A Scandal in Bohemia." A charismatic performer and the intellectual equal (some would say superior) the men she encounters, Irene Adler is as much at home with a spyglass and revolver as with haute couture and gala balls.

And her adventures are the stuff of legend. She has faced down sinister spies, thwarted plots against nations, spurned a monarch and lived to reap a sweet revenge...and now is on the hunt for one of the true monsters of all time-Jack the Ripper. It was she who led a most unlikely group of allies through the cellars and catacombs of 1889 Paris in the search and capture of the suspect at a horrific secret-cult ceremony held beneath the city. But disaster has scattered those allies and the Ripper has again escaped, this time from the custody of the Paris police. Sherlock Holmes has returned to London, and Watson, to reinvestigate the Whitechapel murders of the previous fall from an entirely new angle.

Irene fears the Ripper will soon carve a bloody trail elsewhere and is eager to hunt this terror down. But terror has struck a little too close to home, for her own nearest and dearest are mysteriously missing--her companion/biographer, Nell Huxleigh, abducted in Paris and her barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, vanished in the wilds of Bohemia.

What should Irene do first? Search for Nell, Godfrey, or the Ripper? Though Irene has many highly placed friends, the Baron de Rothschild, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Prince of Wales can only offer money and good will.

For the actual pursuit, Irene must rely on an unreliable cohort, the American prostitute named Pink, who has proven to be someone with her own agenda, and Bram Stoker, the theatrical manager who was later to pen Dracula. The trail will lead back to Bohemia and on to new and bloodier atrocities before pursuers and prey reunite at a remote castle in Transylvania, where lthe Ripper is cornered and fully unveiled at last . . . a truly astounding yet chillingly logical answer to what the world has never known before:

Who was Jack the Ripper?



At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Historical, Mystery Thriller, Suspense

512 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 15, 2003

About the author

Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28.
Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks.

Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots.

Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016.

All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook.

Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well.

Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you."

Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.

Reviews

[Sarah Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF.

You're probably wondering why I gave it 3 stars despite the DNF tag. In all honesty, I do think this book is well-written & creative -- but it's not my style. I'm not into long-running mystery series or Sherlock Holmes fanfic; if I was, I'd probably have found this more interesting. Ah well. Not going to force myself to finish. Instead I'm gifting my copies of this & Chapel Noir to a Sherlockian friend -- hopefully they'll find a better home on her shelves.

[International Cat Lady · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed with this book. It's the second part of the story that began in book #5 in this series, Chapel Noir. While I thoroughly enjoyed Chapel Noir, I felt that Castle Rouge stretched things way too far - and far too into the realms of disbelief. While I can easily imagine Irene, Godfrey, and Nell traipsing across Europe, solving crimes, and foiling Sherlock Holmes, Castle Rouge's descent into Satanist sex cults led by a young Rasputin (who is actually also Jack the Ripper!) was just too fantastical. I also didn't enjoy the fact that the villains were merely bad guys recycled from previous books in the series, and whose only motivations for their acts seemed to be 1. Evilness and 2. Dislike of Irene. Lastly, there were the similarities between this tale and Bram Stoker's Dracula. I have mixed feelings about that. I have read Dracula numerous times, so I was able to see both the obvious references and the far more subtle references. Having Bram Stoker as a character in the tale (who is inspired by his experiences and later bases Dracula on them) is, in one sense, quite clever. On the other hand, taking so many aspects of Dracula and incorporating them into Castle Rouge seems rather a bit like cheating.

[Gary Lange · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very little plot. Nothing happens for ever and then, bang, it's over. I loved the first book of the series, but I am done with them.

[Summer Seeds]

DNF at page 240. This was terribly boring.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly satisfying conclusion to an exciting, well-written and creatively conceived story!

This conclusion to the story begun in the previous Chapel Noir was just as detailed and circuitously thrilling as part one with a great many twists and turns. The plot for this book alternated between the investigations of Irene Adler and the mysterious "Pink" to try to locate Irene's missing husband, Godfrey, and her ever-present companion, Nell - both of whom vanished without a trace in the previous book, and the story of where Nell and Godfrey actually are and what is happening to them, told from Nell's perspective.

This book is just as detailed and heavy on "atmosphere" as the previous story was, and although I found the descriptions made sense for the time and the story in which they were included, I was a bit more impatient with the details in this book. In fairness, that may simply have been because I was dying to find out how everything would end.

The other plot-line is the search that everyone involved is chasing - Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson figure even more prominently in this book than they did in the previous installment - is the identity and capture of Jack the Ripper, who, in this story cuts a swath [no pun intended!] across three different European cities with his vicious atrocities.

While I won't include a spoiler by telling who the author decides to cast as the Ripper, I will say that when I got to that revelation, at first I was a bit skeptical. However, the more I thought about it, I decided that given that Jack the Ripper has been purported to be everyone from doctors to Royalty through the years and other stories, this supposition of who he *might* have been seems as plausible as any other - particularly given the plot that Carole Nelson Douglas wraps that contention in.

All in all a very enjoyable, exciting story! I will definitely look at other books by this author, particularly others with Irene Adler as the main character - I love the character and the adventures she has, as well as the supporting cast of characters who surround her. I recommend both these books!

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review title: Guilty pleasure with too much the first, not enough the second
The cover quotes and author bio, as well as the "Reader's Guide" at the end as if this were Classic literature, give too much weight to this mystery-romance claptrap. I picked this up at a used-book sale based on the plot recap involving Sherlock Holmes, along with his erstwhile female protagonist Irene Adler, in the search for Jack the Ripper.

It was my first exposure to Douglas, but I thought: can't go wrong pitting the fictional detective against the too-real serial killer who shared the same London of the late 19th century, can you? Well, Douglas apparently thinks you can, because she ladles on helpings of Bram Stoker (a struggling theater manager before writing his Draculan opus) and Nellie Bly (the emancipated female journalist), and concocting a plot involving additional Ripper murders in Paris and Prague, bizarre cultic rituals, and (wait for it) . . . . mysterious doings in a Transylvanian castle! As a bonus, her candidate for the true Jack the Ripper turns out to be another historical figure I've never before heard connected to the Ripper account--perhaps because the connection is so far-fetched!

And all of this is in a coy, stilted writing style that reads like romance fiction. OK, so I've never read Harlequin novels, but some of the dialogue and writing here is groan-out-loud funny and not in a good way. Surely there is a similarity here?

If I were not reading this in Beijing with limited access to other English-language reading material, I would have probably stopped. Unfortunately, in my small stash of things to read I also brought a followup to this novel that includes not only Stoker and Bly, but throws in Oscar Wilde for good measure!

[Jenna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book began at a fast and enjoyable pace, although it did slow down during the second half into what felt ... somehow, detached, perhaps because the novel doesn't really follow any one character with whom the readers can readily identify. One of the things I found particularly well done in this novel, however, was the way Douglas flawlessly put Nell through a metamorphosis. Nell's character was never inconsistent, and yet for all that, by page 427, Nell has become a very round character and has made a beautiful realization like that made by every young adult who, painfully, must leave childhood behind.

I heard the mysterious murmurs of a married couple beyond the connecting door. And the mysterious silences.
I felt a warm flood of security, like a child who knows her parents are in the house. I also felt the cold, hot, empty loneliness of a child who knows she must grow up someday, and then who will take care of her? No one.
Castle Rouge, page 423

I always relish Douglas' narration of Holmes, and especially enjoyed the scenes written from Dr. Watson's point of view. I haven't yet decided if I will read the next one: I was disappointed that Nell and Quentin didn't reconcile with one another in this novel, and that is perhaps the only reason that I might read the next book. That, however, depends upon whether or not Nell and Quentin ever do make up in the next novel, and, for that matter, whether they get to see each other at all...

[Merle · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a Holmes-related work,it didn't do a lot for me. But I made the mistake of starting with a recent volume in the series which is the second volume of a pair of works. Now I have to go back and get a better feel for her earlier contributions to the type. The novel strains with hard work -- switching first person narrators - historical details--Victorian adventure -- over-the-top silliness --but I had to finish just see what she would do with it. My mood may not have been tuned to her humor, parody, whatever. Douglas also has a large series involving a cat P.I. I'll have to read one of those, too, I suppose. Hope it won't come across as such a serious endeavor.

[Brittnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It takes a while to get to the point. Perhaps I missed a bunch of the story because I started with this, the last book of the series, but sadly, I don't feel that I need to go back and start at the beginning. I do like how the author jumped from narrator to narrator through-out, but I was often lost in disinterest in some of the long narratives.

Perhaps if I had started with the first book, I might feel differently, but overall I felt this book was more filler than anything.

[Elderberrywine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well now, that was certainly a novel solution for Jack the Ripper. *eyebrow highly askance* But what with Irene and her contingent, Sherlock Holmes and the, alas, far too briefly present Dr. Watson, Bram Stoker and, why not, Nelly Bly, a marvelously and gloriously gruesome time is had by all.

[Cheryl Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

The second half of a novel begun in 'Chapel Noir.' A letdown after the stronger first half. Not nearly as satisfying. And since it is the 2nd half of the same novel, the whole suffers from it, unfortunately.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I agree with most reviews that this was a slow starter, I have to say I was still in love with the tale. Bouncing around between sets of characters was a bit difficult, yet no different from the usual inlets from Dr Watson in Douglas's other stories.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the characters, and their world and hope I get the chance to read the story again and/or to read more within the series.

My Rating System:
* couldn't finish, ** wouldn't recommend, *** would recommend, **** would read again, ***** have read again.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Castle Rouge is the follow-up to Castle Noir, where Irene Adler and her trusty sidekick Nell are determined to catch Jack the Ripper. The book weaves a very fanciful but believable story of the Ripper's identity and why it has remained a secret all these years.

[Alexandra]

6th in the series.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good Sherlockian story though Irene is so perfect it can be annoying.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Jack the Ripper tale...'nough said.

[Gemma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dull. May not finish.

[Wendy]

Another great story in the Irene Adler series.

[Gina Boyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Over civilized Englishmen made my head ache, but uncivilized Englishmen reminded me of wolves." -- pink

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has put me off the series permanently. Could see the ending 500 pages away. I recommend the first four books in the series only.

[M Kemp]

Not in library

[Jutta · Rating 5 out of 5]

this one is definately my favorite. but by the end I did want to tell pink to keep her grubby mitts.of quentin....

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you love Sherlock Holmes, you will most assuredly enjoy Carole Nelson Douglas' Irene Adler mystery series. If you are indeed a Holmes affectionato, you will recognize this immortal line: "Good Night, Mr. Holmes." The mysterious Irene Adler - "the woman" to Holmes - spoke this parting line while she was disguised as a man, ironically both mocking and bidding farewell to Holmes near the end of Doyle’s "Scandal in Bohemia". How interesting and enjoyable it is to see Adler developed into an even more dynamic, complex character; here the creative mind of Douglas gives us a deeper look at Irene Adler, who was one of the few people and the only woman to thwart Sherlock Holmes.

"Castle Rouge,” the sixth in this series, actually began late in “Chapel Noir” (book #5) where Irene Adler and her trusty sidekick Nell are determined to catch Jack the Ripper. Nell ~ Penelope Huxleigh (Irene Adler's Dr. Watson) ~ was kidnapped, so now “Pink,” an American reporter, helps Irene’s search for Nell and the ‘Ripper.’

While I thoroughly enjoyed “Chapel Noir,” I felt that “Castle Rouge” stretched things stretched some things a bit too far ~ especially in the second half of the plot. Otherwise, the plot is carefully crafted. The book's enjoyment is enhanced by appearances of historical figures as Bram Stoker and even Holmes and Watson themselves; all help make this book more realistic and certainly more enjoyable to read. Douglas' "Castle Rouge" does start out slowly, but the pace picks up later in the book. On the other hand, her characterization is good and the reader begins to like and to care about the characters. Lastly, there were some similarities between this tale and Bram Stoker's “Dracula,” which I enjoyed. Although a bit weaker than the prior books, it is still an enjoyable reader with a lot of action. I’m on the to the next in the series!

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this novel. It is good-- it is lacking-- it is interesting-- it is tedious

The first problem is that I came in in the middle of a series. The author compensates somewhat for that by offering an occasional recap of previous adventures. However, this particular novel seemed to be a continuation of the previous novel.

There were many familiar historical and literary characters referenced, appearing in supporting roles, etc. These characters add some depth and breadth to the story.

The story is written from constantly switching points of view. At times, "Pink" (Nellie Blye) writes, at times it is Nell, at times it is Watson. This switching back and forth at times was helpful, but at other times it caused me dizziness and annoyance. Sadly, the "voice" of each writer are so similar, in that Victorian style, as to be no different.

The story concerns Holmes and Adler (separately) chasing after Jack the Ripper, even though they thought they had the ripper issues resolved (apparently in the previous installment). The tenacity of our heroes leads them eventually to Transylvania, where we expect they will encounter Count Dracula. The reader continues turning the page expecting to discover that the infamous Vampire is also Jack the Ripper.. Which leads me to great disappointment... for they never encounter Dracula, but instead a more reality grounded encounter.

Overall, this did not lead me to want to read more of these novels... but this one was interesting.

[Goose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than Chapel Noir but still not the best. Once the recap from the previous novel is over and the action moves to Nell and Godfrey and where they are being held prisoner, my interest peaked. Still not that interested in guesses as to whom was Jack The Ripper. More Bram Stoker and less Nellie Bly would have helped. Still if you read the one before you will probably read this. Hope the next one in the series is better.

[Maryellen Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not her best.

Too preachy. Too much "talking heads" conversation. BUT still a great story with great characters and gripping plot. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

[Tom Shrimplin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting twist with Irene Adler, Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker, and Nellie Bly all involved in solving the Jack the Ripper case! A little long but very enjoyable!

[Bethany Swafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

With her dear friend, Nell, and her husband, Godfrey, missing, Irene Adler-Norton calls upon all her resources to find them. She must find the connection between Prague, Paris, and London to find Jack the Ripper.

Though this does not contain as many orgies as the previous novel, it is still not for the faint-hearted. Girls have been murdered in ritual settings, blood has been drunk, and lust abounds. Sherlock Holmes seeks clues to the Whitechapel murders, consenting to bring Watson along for part of his quest. It was enjoyable to have the loyal doctor on the scene to add his observations.

Throughout the book, Irene and 'Pink' from the previous book emulate Nell as they journey through Prague. We revisit places we've been before and meet villains who have refused to bow out in graceful defeat. Irene uses all her skills to get the help she needs, while Pink plots to make an account of what's happening for her own benefit.

An interesting addition to the series, and one I would recommend to readers who enjoy gritty historical mysteries.

[D Corbishley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the best of the series. Slow and dark, not as personable as the earlier books and keeps rehashing earlier adventures to add bulk. This and the previous book could have been tightened into one and not turned me off the series.