Castle Rouge

From the flaps of the Forge first edition: "Before Caleb Carr, Anne Perry, and Laurie E. King, Carole Nelson Douglas gave readers a delightful look into Victoriana with Irene Adler, the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes, in "A Scandal in Bohemia." A charismatic performer and the intellectual equal to the men she encounters, Irene Adler is as much at home with a spyglass and revolver as with haute couture and gala balls. She has thwarted plots against nations, spurned a monarch, and lived to reap a sweet revenge. Now Irene is on the hunt for one of the true monsters of all time - Jack the Ripper. It was she who led the search, with a most unlikely group of allies, through the catacombs of 1889 Paris, to capture the suspect at a horrific secret-cult ceremony held beneath the city. But disaster has scattered those allies and the Ripper has again escaped. 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 strike again and is eager to hunt this monster 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. Where should Irene search first? Though Irene has many highly placed friends, the Baron de Rothschild, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Prince of Wales can offer only money and goodwill. 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 will later 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 the Ripper is cornered and fully unveiled, at last to answer the question the world is asking: Who is Jack the Ripper?"