Adventure of the Clay Signets: New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (The Untold Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes: From the Tin Dispatch-Box) - Tapa blanda

Adventure of the Clay Signets (Paperback)

Paperback. Condición: new. Paperback. Three heirs dead on the eve of their forty-fifth birthdays. Twenty-four clay medallions to reckon the living and the dead.When a heavy mahogany case arrives without warning at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson are drawn into an affair of extraordinary malice. Within the case lie twenty-four discs of dried marsh-clay: three fired to dull terra-cotta, dusted with soot, and stamped with an ancient armorial seal; the remaining twenty-one left ominously blank.The caller is Giles Abernathy, an attorney driven to wit's end by a succession of quiet catastrophes at Blackwood Hall on the desolate Kentish coast. Governed by an eccentric seventeenth-century entailment, the vast Abernathy estates and coal fortunes bypass general probate, settling strictly upon the eldest surviving male kin on his forty-fifth birthday. Should the heir perish an hour before midnight of that natal day, the entire inheritance rolls inexorably to the next in blood.Over the preceding nine months, three athletic, temperate heirs-Geoffrey, Lionel, and Arthur-have each dropped dead within hours of reaching forty-five. In every instance, the country surgeons certified the demise as natural, idiopathic cardiac arrest. Yet when the funerary clay impressions of the three dead men vanish from the church crypt of St. Jude-in-the-Fens-only to reappear in the locked study of the current heir, Julian Abernathy-it becomes clear that an invisible executioner is marking time by the family calendar. Julian's forty-fifth birthday falls in precisely forty-eight hours.Journeying into the fog-bound saltings of the Hoo Peninsula, Holmes casts aside talk of family curses to hunt a terrestrial predator. On his knees in ancient bedchambers, stable harness-rooms, and desecrated Norman vaults, Holmes pieces together a trail of subtle clues: a microscopic thorn in a riding glove, a crystalline residue behind a brass bell-pull, and an uncommon gutta-percha heel-plate stamped in the river mud. To save the last living heir, Holmes must unmask a physiological weapon unknown to the British Pharmacopoeia before the grandfather clock strikes the fatal chimes of midnight.Narrated in the classic, atmospheric voice of Dr. Watson, The Adventure of the Clay Signets is a meticulously crafted Victorian locked-room mystery steeped in authentic forensic deduction, legal intrigue, and gothic suspense. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Nº de ref. del artículo: 9798174453241

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