Eleven further cases. Not all of them end well.

A Welsh slate quarry conceals a death that was never meant to be found. A man sits on the same park bench every Wednesday at precisely eleven o'clock, and no one can say why. A widow in Camberwell insists her optician brother was murdered, though the police see nothing to investigate. Five elderly gentlemen arrive at Baker Street together, furious about a card game that took place forty years ago.

From a flooded Thames foreshore to the kennels of Highgate, from a cemetery stakeout in the rain to a cuneiform tablet that has waited twenty-five centuries to tell a lie, Dr. Watson chronicles cases in which Holmes's deductions are as sharp as ever — but the world is less obliging. Justice is late, or partial, or beyond reach. The truth, once found, does not always console.

These are stories about the distance between seeing clearly and being able to act — and about what remains when the case is closed but the damage is done.

The Darker Reaches of Sherlock Holmes is the second volume in The Sherlock Holmes Casebooks — a series of 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 and The Blind Spots of Sherlock Holmes.