Irene at Large. Carole Nelson Douglas

Irene at Large. Carole Nelson Douglas

Irene At Large is the third in a series of mystery novels based on the career of Irene Adler Norton, a character from one of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. In Doyle's A Scandal In Bohemia Irene Adler outsmarts Holmes and wins his lasting admiration. Carol Nelson Douglas has taken this story as the basis for a series of delightful mystery novels that include Holmes and his companion Watson in mysteries that run parallel to the Holmes stories.

She has also created a framework for this continued series based on a current day historian Fiona Witherspoon who has supposedly discovered the diaries of Irene's companion Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh and unpublished memoirs of Dr. Watson that she blends into the novels of the series.

In this outing the plot takes place around the events of Doyle's story The Naval Treaty. Irene and Nell run into an old acquaintance of Nell's, Quentin Stanhope, dressed in Eastern garb, feverish, and quite unkempt. When they take him home, an attempt is made on his life. As they try to uncover his attacker, they find the answer may lie in events at the British battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan nine years earlier that link Stanhope to Dr. Watson and a mysterious spy known as Tiger.

This is an excellent story that should appeal to readers familiar with the tales of Sherlock Holmes, but who seek a more feminine and feminist point of view on the period and the characters.