Sherlock Holmes is dead. Or so the world believes.
The year is 1946. London lies in ruins, scarred by war and haunted by ghosts. An elderly Holmes lives in the museum that was once 221B Baker Street, tending to his bees and his memories. He has broken the Chain of the Past-or so he thought.
Then a letter arrives. No stamp. No return address. Inside, a single sentence in a handwriting that has been dead for twenty-three years: "The dead do not always stay dead, Mr. Holmes. Ask your brother."
Holmes embarks on a journey that will shatter everything he knows about himself. A mysterious woman named Adriana Moriarty claims to be the daughter of his greatest enemy. A faceless man haunts the moors of Scotland, leaving mathematical equations on abbey walls. And deep beneath a forgotten laboratory, suspended in amber fluid, a man with Holmes's face waits to be awakened.
The clone is real. The clone is alive. And the clone believes he is the original.
From the burning warehouses of London's East End to the secret vaults beneath St. Paul's Cathedral, from the glass tanks of Grantchester to the river wall where a woman's sixty-year obsession ends in sacrifice, The Chain of the Shadow takes you deeper into Holmes's world than ever before.
Mrs. Hudson is not who you think she is. Watson's loyalty hides a betrayal decades in the making. And the sixth finger-the mark of the Ashworth curse-burns on the hand of Holmes's own granddaughter.
Can an old man outsmart his own reflection? Can a copy find a soul? And when the final choice comes-between saving a friend and sacrificing a son-what will Sherlock Holmes do?
This is not the Holmes of the newspapers. This is the Holmes of the shadows. Broken, fragile, terrifyingly human. And yet more brilliant-and more dangerous-than ever.
Over 78,000 words of mystery, suspense, and heartbreak. The second book in the Chain series. Read the foreword by Dr. John Watson himself. Then close the book and ask yourself: What is the one link in your own chain that you have never dared to break?
