The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"My murder will take place in a darkened séance room—shot twice in the chest.” The words are a premonition related to Arthur Conan Doyle when he answers a summons for help from a mysterious woman who identifies herself only as “a Spiritualist Medium of some renown.”

1895. Victorian England trembles on the verge of anarchy. Handbills plastered across London scream of revolution and insurrection. Terrorist bombs are detonating around the Capitol and every foreigner is suspected of being a bomb-throwing Anarchist lurking beneath a cape. Even Palace officials whisper warnings of a coup-de-tat. Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle is summoned from a peaceful dinner in the palm-room of the Tivoli restaurant to the scene of a gruesome crime that has baffled and outraged Scotland Yard’s best.

During a sultry London summer, the capitol is stricken by an outbreak of what newspapers soon dub “Sleepwalking Hysteria.” Strangely, nearly all the somnambulists are lissome young ladies from good homes. Stranger still, many of the sleepwalkers are committing crimes including burglary and arson, while others simply vanish into the night, never to be seen again. Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde are swept up in the case when they try to rescue one such somnambulist only to watch her plummet to her death.

When Oscar Wilde answers an urgent summons to the British Museum Reading Room, he finds his friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, in a state of profound agitation. The Scots author has discovered a mysterious Casebook #5 entitled: The Faerie Vortex. The Casebook contains a highly fantastical story about a trip the two authors made to the seaside town of Darvington in response to a letter from a woman who claims her daughters had been abducted by faeries.