Europe, 1935. Preparing for a calamitous war throughout Europe, six homicidal 'lunatics' named the Devil's Six, are confined
...Rosa Fisher is the smart girl, the good girl & at twenty-five & mid-way through a Ph D in the psychology of fraud, she thinks
...As Sherlock Holmes once conceded to Dr. Watson, ' If we could fly out of that window hand in h&, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs & peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations & leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities & foreseen conclusions most stale & unprofitable.' & with such a spirit for investigation & discovery does David Grann set out in The Devil & Sherlock Holmes to unravel the truth of twelve great, real-life mysteries. Although Holmes is the subject of just one of the mesmerizing true stories in this collection, all twelve contain elements of intrigue. Many of the protagonists are sleuths: a Polish detective trying to determine whether an author planted clues to a real murder in his post-modern novel; an arson investigator racing to prove whether a man about to be executed is innocent; a legendary French con man questioning whether he is the one who is suddenly being conned; & scientists stalking a sea monster. Unlike the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, these tales are all true. The protagonists are mortal & pieces of the puzzle often elude them. Some of the characters are driven to deception & murder. Others go mad. But ultimately the stories contained in The Devil & Sherlock Holmes shed light on the human condition, & why some people on this earth devote themselves to good & others to evil. As Holmes put it, ' Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent'.