Sherlock Holmes and the Stolen Stars: A Tale of Forgery, Fraud and a Locked Room

A dead man in a locked room. A machine that should not be moving. And a secret hidden inside a wooden star.

London, January 1893. When Clara Hale arrives at 221B Baker Street with frost on her cloak and fear in her eyes, she brings Sherlock Holmes a puzzle unlike any he has encountered. Her uncle—a reclusive collector of rare scientific instruments—has been found dead beside a magnificent sixteenth-century astrarium, a mechanical model of the heavens. The room was locked from within. The machine was running. And one of its tiny planets was turning the wrong way.

Scotland Yard calls it an accident. Holmes sees something far more sinister: brass filings that don’t belong, a faint trace of chloroform on a dead man’s collar, and a scorch mark on a windowsill that tells the story of a murderer’s escape. At the centre of the web is Professor Adrian Vane—a charismatic scholar whose celebrated career may be built on forged provenance and fabricated history.

As Holmes and Watson untangle a conspiracy of academic fraud, stolen antiquities, and cold-blooded murder, they discover that the astrarium holds one final secret—a hidden document that could destroy a reputation or condemn a killer. But Vane is brilliant, desperate, and dangerously composed. And he has already proven what he is willing to do to keep the truth buried.

A richly atmospheric locked-room mystery in the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle—where every clue is earned, every deduction follows, and the game is very much afoot.