The year is 1896, and St. Paul’s magnificent Winter Carnival is under way when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city’s most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. A wealthy young man disappears on the eve of his wedding—and his fiancée suspiciously discards her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival’s Ice Palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case. His pursuit of the murderer takes him through the highest echelons of St. Paul society and into cahoots with Shadwell Rafferty, a gregarious saloonkeeper and part-time private investigator. Soon Holmes, Watson, and Rafferty are embroiled in a perilous adventure that takes them from one frozen corner of the city to another and out onto the treacherous ice of the Mississippi River as they trail a cruel and ruthless killer.

Hired by the king of Sweden to authenticate an odd stone unearthed by a Minnesota farmer, Sherlock Holmes soon finds himself investigating theft and murder as well.

In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe. When experts arrive to open the safe and examine its contents, they make an astonishing discovery. There, inside, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, M.D. The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist—known only as the Red Demon—who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway. Set against the backdrop of the real, devastating Hinckley forest fire of 1894, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon is the tense and atmospheric first novel in Larry Millett’s classic series of adventures that brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Minnesota.

In 1896, the Winter Carnival is in full swing, but St. Paul’s wealthiest man has lost his head—literally. A young man disappears just before his wedding, and his fiancée has already given back her wedding dress. When a gruesome discovery is made in the Ice Palace, there’s only one man for the job. Sherlock Holmes is summoned to solve a mystery that’s hardly elementary. With the help of trusty Watson and Irish barkeep Shadwell Rafferty, it’s up to Holmes to track a cold-blooded killer from the icy streets of St. Paul to the frozen Mississippi River.

Dogged by depression, doubt, and—as a trip to the Mayo Clinic has revealed—emphysema, 66-year-old Sherlock Holmes is preparing to return to England when he receives a shock: a note slipped under his hotel room door, from a vicious murderer

Welcome to Paradise County, Minnesota. No, it doesn't resemble the original Garden of Eden. It was named after a nineteenth-century lumberman who turned its towering groves of virgin pines into stumps, setting the stage for a huge forest fire that killed 400 people. After that catastrophe, settlers arrived to build hardscrabble farms out of the ashes, and the county became just another lonely, quiet place in the cold heart of flyover land. But that all changed one day when a baffling mystery began to unfold in the county seat of Pineland, a small town of under three thousand people on the banks of the Paradise River. The county's richest man, Peter Swindell, vanishes after his hilltop mansion is blown to bits. Soon, vaguely threatening messages appear all around town, posted by a shadowy figure who calls himself the Serenader. A high-powered lawyer from Chicago suddenly appears in Pineland, with a mysterious story of her own to tell. Murder and mayhem follow, set to the curious music of an old and all-but-forgotten song called "Pineland Serenade." Local and state law enforcement officials appear unable to solve the mystery-or perhaps they are part of it, hiding old and deep secrets. It's left to the newly elected county attorney, Paul Zweifel, to solve the case. A sharp-tongued loner whose best friend is an existential border collie named Camus, Zweifel begins digging into the mystery even as he becomes a suspect in the crimes. The case leads him down a winding trail into the pure heart of evil and a final, chilling confrontation with the Serenader.

These are the last twelve stories Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes and Watson. They reflect the disillusioned world of the 1920s and also include some of the wittiest passages in the series.