Welcome to Paradise County, Minnesota. No, it doesn't resemble the original Garden of Eden. It was named after a nineteenth-century lumberman who turned its towering groves of virgin pines into stumps, setting the stage for a huge forest fire that killed 400 people. After that catastrophe, settlers arrived to build hardscrabble farms out of the ashes, and the county became just another lonely, quiet place in the cold heart of flyover land. But that all changed one day when a baffling mystery began to unfold in the county seat of Pineland, a small town of under three thousand people on the banks of the Paradise River. The county's richest man, Peter Swindell, vanishes after his hilltop mansion is blown to bits. Soon, vaguely threatening messages appear all around town, posted by a shadowy figure who calls himself the Serenader. A high-powered lawyer from Chicago suddenly appears in Pineland, with a mysterious story of her own to tell. Murder and mayhem follow, set to the curious...]]> Mon, 27 Jul 2020 19:10:08 +0300 https://biography.library.land/larry-millett/657698-sherlock_holmes_and_the_ice_palace_murders.html https://biography.library.land/larry-millett/657698-sherlock_holmes_and_the_ice_palace_murders.html

The year is 1896, and St. Paul's magnificent Winter Carnival is under way when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city's most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man disappears on the eve of his wedding—and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival's Ice Palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case.

His pursuit of the murderer takes him through the highest echelons of St. Paul society and into cahoots with Shadwell Rafferty, a gregarious saloonkeeper and part-time private investigator. Soon Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty are embroiled in a perilous adventure that takes them from one frozen corner of the city to another and out onto the treacherous ice of the Mississippi River as they trail a cruel and ruthless killer.

St. Paul, Minnesota. October 1, 1917. High above the city, a renowned local financier named Artemis Dodge lies facedown on the floor of his armored penthouse sanctuary, a single bullet hole in his head. Thirty stories up, in the city's tallest building, and not a shred of evidence or sign pointing to anyone having broken into the wealthy man's fortress. It is—to all appearances—an impossible crime.

Enter Shadwell Rafferty: Irishman, St. Paul saloonkeeper, sometime detective, and old friend of the celebrated sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Summoned by Louis B. Hill—son of railroad magnate James J. Hill—to investigate, Rafferty descends into a world dominated by greedy tycoons and awash in political intrigue and wartime fearmongering. Suspects lurk in every corner of the city—including Dodge's beautiful young widow, his slippery assistant, and a shadowy anarchist—and Rafferty pursues them from the streets of Ramsey Hill and the rooms of the Ryan...]]> Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:21:23 +0300 https://biography.library.land/larry-millett/636045-9780816677047_pdf.html https://biography.library.land/larry-millett/636045-9780816677047_pdf.html
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The ninth and final Minnesota mystery, in which Shadwell Rafferty, with the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, may have solved his own murder
Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty's death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world's most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend's killer.

Set amid the glittering society and sordid underworld of 1928 St. Paul, Larry Millett's ninth and final Shadwell Rafferty mystery takes readers through the serpentine twists of Rafferty's fatal investigation, even as Holmes, following in Rafferty's tracks, may be closing in on the answer to both cases. This ingenious double mystery takes us to every corner of St. Paul, from the...]]> Thu, 23 Jun 2022 17:55:26 +0300