Friday Memes: The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer

Happy Friday everybody!

Book Beginnings on Friday is now hosted by Rose City Reader. The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Beginning:

For a good portion of my adult life I have been involved with and found myself editing missing, unknown, or unearthed manuscripts alleged to have been authored by Sherlock Holmes's amanuensis, John H. Watson, M.D. It had been years since i had given any thought to this subject when an item in the New York Times last September caught my eye.

Friday 56:

"Can you ask when our train leaves for Odessa?"

She posed the question to the porter, who jabbered back with much gesticulating, while we waited. Why is it, I wonder, that when such seemingly simple exchanges occur in a foreign tongue they always appear to consume inordinate amounts of time?

This week I am spotlighting The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols: Adapted from the Journals of John H. Watson, M.D. by Nicholas Mayer. This is a review copy that I found at Edelweiss and feeds my obsession with all things Sherlock Holmes. Here is the description from Amazon:

With the international bestseller The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Nicholas Meyer brought to light a previously unpublished case of Sherlock Holmes, as recorded by Dr. John H. Watson. Now Meyer returns with a shocking discovery―an unknown case drawn from a recently unearthed Watson journal.beg

January 1905: Holmes and Watson are summoned by Holmes' brother Mycroft to undertake a clandestine investigation. An agent of the British Secret Service has been found floating in the Thames, carrying a manuscript smuggled into England at the cost of her life. The pages purport to be the minutes of a meeting of a secret group intent on nothing less than taking over the world.

Based on real events, the adventure takes the famed duo―in the company of a bewitching woman―aboard the Orient Express from Paris into the heart of Tsarist Russia, where Holmes and Watson attempt to trace the origins of this explosive document. On their heels are desperate men of unknown allegiance, determined to prevent them from achieving their task. And what they uncover is a conspiracy so vast as to challenge Sherlock Holmes as never before.