Twenty mysteries. Twenty impossible events. One mind capable of finding the truth.

Sherlock Holmes has confronted murderers, thieves & blackmailers, but some cases seem to challenge reason itself.

A corpse refuses to grow cold. A portrait whispers the names of those who will die. A woman knows who is calling before the telephone rings. A gentleman remembers an entire life he never lived. A music box plays for the dead. A man's reflection begins moving independently of him. When a photographer develops the final image supposedly preserved in a murdered man's eye, the face of the killer appears upon the plate.

Ghosts, prophecy, telepathy, impossible machines & phenomena that appear to defy the laws of nature draw Holmes & Dr Watson into twenty strange & extraordinary investigations.

Yet Holmes has little patience for the supernatural.

Behind every impossible event lies something far more dangerous:

human ingenuity.

From gaslit drawing rooms & locked bedrooms to séances, laboratories & shadowed Victorian streets, Holmes must separate illusion from evidence, expose ingenious deceptions & discover the very human motives hidden beneath apparently impossible crimes.

Narrated by Dr John Watson, Sherlock Holmes: Weird & Wonderful Short Mysteries is a collection of twenty compact Victorian mysteries built around one irresistible question:

When every explanation seems impossible, what remains for Sherlock Holmes to discover? 

When an anonymous letter accuses Dr John Watson of causing a soldier’s death at Maiwand fifteen years earlier, the past reaches into Baker Street with terrifying precision.

Captain Philip Selwyn died after Watson administered morphia. Now someone claims to possess proof that Watson made a fatal medical error & demands that he steal a sealed Afghan packet from Sherlock Holmes in exchange for silence.

Before Watson can uncover the truth, former medical orderly Joseph Dacre arrives at Baker Street carrying dangerous memories of Maiwand. Hours later, he is dead, poisoned by morphia from a sealed prescription bottle & Watson’s own repaired syringe is found among his effects.

Arrested, disgraced & haunted by the possibility that two deaths may be connected to his own hands, Watson must trust Holmes to separate fact from accusation.

But the evidence is genuine. The bottle was sealed, the syringe is Watson’s, and somewhere behind the truth stands a respected physician with everything to lose. To save Watson, Holmes must solve a murder begun fifteen years ago. 

When Sherlock Holmes is summoned across the Atlantic by an English auditor investigating a dead man’s impossible signature, he expects fraud. Instead, he finds murder, an old crime buried beneath fourteen years of silence & a young man whose sleeping words appear to foretell death.

Edgar Cayce has no desire to be a prophet. Yet while in trance, he describes events he could not possibly have witnessed, including details of a murder that has not yet occurred.

Then the predictions begin coming true.

As fear spreads through rural Kentucky, Holmes faces an adversary willing to turn prophecy itself into a weapon. Every new vision threatens another life, while an old land conspiracy draws Holmes towards a calculating enemy determined to make the future obey.

But when Cayce describes Watson lying motionless at precisely 11:20, even Holmes must confront an unsettling question.

Can a crime be prevented when its ending has already been seen?

Holmes may explain the murderer.

Edgar Cayce is another matter entirely.

London has always been a city of wealth, poverty & hidden movement, but when Sir William Harcourt is found dead in his Mayfair study, the murder appears staged with a woman’s bloodied thimble, a gentleman’s hat & a locked-room impossibility. Sherlock Holmes soon discovers that the death is only the first move in a larger design.

Across the capital, strange objects are left beside bodies: a boot, an iron, a dog, a wheelbarrow. Each symbol points to property, debt, ruined lives & an old conspiracy that once destroyed an innocent man. As Holmes & Watson follow the trail through Mayfair, Whitechapel, railway yards & fog-bound streets, they realise London itself has become the board & every murder is a calculated advance.

Behind the killings stands a shadowy figure known as the Black Coachman, moving through the city like an unseen player. To stop the game, Holmes must uncover who truly owns London’s streets before the final square is reached.