Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery

The numerous mystery fans and discerning Sherlockian experts who have been following “Watson’s American chronicles” will be thrilled by the third manuscript to be “discovered”: Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery. As the century winds down, Holmes’s services are engaged by a personage no less than King Oskar II of Sweden, who proposes to purchase a mysterious stone dug up by a western Minnesota farmer. But before the celebrated detective can attempt to authenticate this fabulous find, the hapless farmer is murdered and his stone vanishes. In this singular case Holmes’s soaring imagination is complemented by the talent for “discreet investigations” first displayed by Irish saloonkeeper Shadwell Rafferty in Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders. Rotund and rollicking, sharp as a St. Paul wind and tough as his own old leather boots, Rafferty accompanies the great detective through a maze of intrigue and villainy on a hunt for a rune stone, a murderer, and the archeological truth.