Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson traverse the British Isles and the Italian peninsula in a rousing new series of adventures. After a thrilling jaunt in the Far East, Holmes and Watson return to England to address an inheritance left by one of Watson’s relatives in Cornwall, half of which he gave to his dear friend, Sherlock Holmes. Financially secure, the two are now free to spend as much time on Baker Street and the Continent as they please, and the duo find themselves as comfortable in Rome on the banks of the Tiber as the Thames. As Holmes rationalizes and ratiocinates his way through case after case, from “The Case of Two Bohemes” to “A Singular Event in Tranquebar,” it’s all in a day’s work, until clues surface that his great nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, might still be alive…

Sherlock Holmes is dead–or so most of the world thinks. His fatal plunge over the Reichenbach Falls as he struggled with his archenemy, Moriarty, has been widely reported. But Holmes has escaped and is alive. In his immediate circle, only Holmes’s brother, the lethargic genius Mycroft, knows of his survival. Even Dr. Watson thinks that the great detective is dead. Among his enemies, Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s chief henchman, knows of Holmes’s probable escape and waits for their inevitable meeting.

From 1891 to 1894, Holmes wanders through Asia. He is alone, without Watson, without Scotland Yard, armed only with his physical strength and endurance and his revered cold logic and rationality. The adventures recounted in The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes range from Lhasa to Katmandu, from the East Indies to the deserts of Rajasthan. In Tibet and throughout the Orient, Holmes is caught up in the diplomatic machinations of British imperialism that Rudyard Kipling dubbed “the Great Game.” He confronts the tsarist agent Dorjiloff, the great art thief Anton Furer, and the mysterious Captain Fant++me. And here, written in Holmes’s own words, is the account of “The Giant Rat of Sumatra,” for which until now he so famously thought the world unprepared.

For Holmes’s fans throughout the world, the stories in The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes fill in an enigmatic gap, the cause of so much speculation in the great detective’s career.