Book review: 'A cracking historical whodunnit'

‘The Shadows of Kensington Gore’ by Ross Montgomery

Hbk, Penguin Viking, £18.99

London 1911, Coronation fever is rising, the Suffragette’s are causing mischief, and a policeman is found brutally murdered. Is there a connection? Fingers of suspicion are pointed at three women seen fleeing the scene.

Their only hope appears to be the word of Stephen Pike: ex-borstal boy, under-butler extraordinaire and assistant to the most unconventional detective in London, Miss Decima Stockingham. Sharp-tongued, fearless and bored of behaving herself, she’s the only one able to see that this case is not what it seems.

Aided by an invisible network of maids – their eyes and ears in every house in London – this unlikely duo must catch the killer before time runs out. But in a city dazzled by ceremony and divided by change, you never know what might be lurking in the shadows. A cracking historical whodunnit, laced with humour and mystery.

A must have for all Sherlock Holmes aficionados. This is the true story of the real man behind the character of the iconic detective. The astonishing true story of Joseph Bell, the Scottish surgeon whose extraordinary talent for detection inspired Sherlock Holmes.

In Edinburgh, 1878 a medical student squeezes into the Royal Infirmary’s packed operating theatre, eager to catch a glimpse of his celebrated professor—a man whose uncanny powers of observation blur the line between diagnosis and detective work. That man was Joseph Bell.

With a flair for the theatrical and an eye for clues hidden in the tiniest details, Bell astonished his students with lightning-fast deductions about his patients’ lives.

Though he considered his methods to be quite ‘elementary’, they captured the imagination of his audience – including his prized student, a young Arthur Conan Doyle, who would eventually abandon his medical career to create the fictional detective.

Both titles are available in the Bridge Bookshops in Port Erin and Ramsey.