Two more cases for Sherlock in The Adventures of the Devil’s Foot and the Red Circle

A recovering Holmes becomes involved in a gruesome case involving the Devil’s Foot and who is a mysterious lodger in the Red Circle?

In The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, Holmes and Dr. Watson travel to Cornwall so that Sherlock can recuperate his health. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis and Mr. Roundhay, the local vicar, come to Holmes for help after Tregennis’s two brothers have gone insane and his sister died overnight. Tregennis had gone to visit them, playing cards into the night and then left. When he returned in the morning, he found them still sitting in their places at the table, the brothers laughing and singing, and the sister dead…

In The Adventure of the Red Circle, Mrs. Warren, a landlady, arrives at Baker Street as she is worried about her new lodger. A young, heavily bearded man offered double her usual rent on the condition that he get the room on his own terms. He insists on having the Daily Gazette every morning, and all other requests are printed on a slip of paper left on a chair outside the room where his meals are also left. He went out the first night and came back after midnight when the rest of the household had gone to bed. Since then, neither Mrs. Warren or her husband have seen him. He also eats very little, and never receives visitors or messages.

In The Devil’s Foot, it felt like a fairly routine story at the beginning yet took a delightful twist once the cause of the madness and later deaths are explained. Holmes and Watson then risk their lives as they put the theory to the test. In The Red Circle this was a story that took another very unexpected turn. From the lodger not being who I expected them to be through to the use of secret codes and a mystery that spans the Atlantic, it kept me guessing throughout.

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot [usr=4]

The Adventure of the Red Circle [usr=4]