Sherlock Holmes and the Vanishing Girls of West Ham

A fiendish, twisty London-set mystery, based on real-life unsolved crime, that sees Holmes and Watson trawl the shabby districts of the East End as they try to uncover who is snatching girls from the streets, and why.

It is 15 February 1890, and Doctor Watson receives a summons from his old friend Sherlock Holmes, telling him to meet him in West Ham, a shabby district of East London. When Watson arrives at a disused property on West Street, he is met by Holmes, Inspector Lestrade and Lestrade’s former protégé Inspector Drake, who now heads up the Metropolitan Police’s K Division, which oversees the district of Stepney.

In the house, Drake leads them to a cupboard in which is concealed the partially decomposed body of a girl. He tells them he’s pretty sure it’s Amelia Jeffs, a 14 year old from West Street who disappeared a couple of weeks ago on her way to buy a fried-fish supper for her family. After Watson confirms the girl has been strangled and estimates she was killed around two weeks ago, Drake reveals that two other teenage girls from the same street, Mary Seward and Eliza Carter, disappeared in 1881 and 1882 respectively.

This is the starting point for the great detective’s descent into a sinister world of child abductions, which always involve the victim being seen with a ‘hideous old woman’ prior to their disappearance. The investigation takes Holmes and Watson to some extremely dark places: to a post office in East London in which the body of a girl is found stuffed into a box; to the pubs of the East End, where rumours of a trafficking gang abound; and to the brothels of Belgium, where English girls who’ve been snatched from the streets are put to work against their will.

But will Sherlock Holmes ever be able to fully discover what really happened to the vanishing girls of West Ham, and solve one of Victorian London’s greatest real-life unsolved crimes?

© 2027 W. F. Howes Ltd (Lydbog): 9781004259120

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Lydbog: 2. september 2027