Latest Books The Big Thrill Recommends: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE TELEGRAM FROM HELL by Nicholas Meyer

The Big Thrill Recommends: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE TELEGRAM FROM HELL by Nicholas Meyer

Recommended by Gregory Stout

Accomplished novelist, director, and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer is no stranger to the lore of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intrepid English detective Sherlock Holmes, having achieved international acclaim with his first (of what is now six Holmes novels), The Seven Percent Solution. In this latest re-creation, SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE TELEGRAM FROM HELL, it is the summer of 1916, and the “War to End all Wars” is going badly. Indeed, war-depleted England’s only hope of avoiding defeat rests upon the United States entering the war on the side of the Allies. However, the American President, Woodrow Wilson—having been re-elected on a platform of “He Kept Us Out of The War”—is committed to keeping America neutral.

To achieve American intervention, Holmes and Watson are summoned out of retirement to undertake a mission to make Wilson reconsider and declare war on Germany. To do this, the pair travel by sea and rail from London to Washington, to New York City, to Texas, and finally to Mexico. Their quest: to intercept a coded document, which history now knows as the infamous Zimmermann Telegram. But will they be in time, and will they survive? German agents are hot on their trail.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE TELEGRAM FROM HELL is a delightful, fast-paced, historically correct novel (with a few embellishments, as the author admits in the prologue) that perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the period. I recommend this book highly.

The Big Thrill Recommends: SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE TELEGRAM FROM HELL by Nicholas Meyer