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Castle Rouge: A Novel of Suspense featuring Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler, and Jack the... by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Features
Mass Market Paperback
Amazon.com
Blend Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes with Dracula lore, toss in a copious complement of czarist Russian history, and the result is Carole Nelson Douglas's Castle Rouge, her grisly but gripping sequel to 2001's Chapel Noir. Disaster has struck opera diva-turned-detective Irene Adler Norton. The American adventuress who bested Holmes and thereby won his admiration (in "A Scandal in Bohemia") thought she'd cornered the elusive Ripper on the grounds of the 1889 world's fair in Paris, but instead, he fled to Eastern Europe after kidnapping her friend and biographer, Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh. Now, while Irene--assisted by theatrical manager Bram Stoker, daredevil Yankee reporter Nellie "Pink" Bly, and British spy Quentin Stanhope--sets out for Prague, hoping to rescue Nell, and as Holmes and Dr. John Watson revisit Saucy Jack's earlier homicidal activities in London, Nell finds herself imprisoned, together with Irene's barrister husband, in a crumbling Transylvanian castle, under the malevolent scrutiny of a Russian woman agent and a brutish lust-murderer endowed with hypnotic powers. Douglas builds considerable intrigue on her way to a surprising solution to the Ripper's identity. Yet it's unfortunate that this sixth Irene Adler yarn focuses more on the prudish Nell and her discomforts as a hostage (no proper corsets-- how shocking!) than on its more intrepid chief protagonist, or even on Pink, whose capacity for audacious exploits was better realized in Chapel Noir. Regrettable, too, is the plot's shift from Paris to the eldritch extremes of Bohemia. Stoker points out that "the region reeks with bizarre legend and folktales," yet Castle Rouge's action takes place well apart from the Gypsy villages that might have provided cultural color. --J. Kingston Pierce
Reader Reviews
FASCINATING "take" on Jack the Ripper, September 14, 2003
Reviewer:
A reader
from From the Show Me! state of Missouri
This is the sequel to Chapel Noir, and I think the two novels are the only ones ever to set women instead of men on the trail of the world's first notorious slayer of women. And what women they are! Douglas revived opera singer Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes story (the only woman to outwit him) as an actress/singer moonlighting as a "private inquiry agent" to make ends meet. An ex-Pinkerton agent in the U.S., Irene turned to serious detection when forced out of her performing career. She is up to outwitting Mr. Holmes again . . . and again, and indeed, Holmes and Irene and her allies are pursuing the Ripper by separate paths that are destined to meet. Irene's allies include her loyal biographer, Nell Huxleigh, a prim Victorian parson's daughter thrown into a world of violent sex crimes with mind-expanding results, and a cheeky American girl found in a Paris brothel when the Ripper seems to have resurfaced in Paris a few months after the Whitechapel atrocities. This is a whole new arena for the Ripper, and the chase in Castle Rouge leads to points east featured earlier in the series, such as legend-haunted Prague, and even farther east into Transylvania. It's no surprise that Dracula author Bram Stoker is along for the ride as both supporter . . . and suspect. Not only does the book offer a whole new perspective on the Ripper murders, but a whole new and intriguing (though fictional) look at why Stoker wrote Dracula. Both old and new characters reveal surprises as they meet challenge after challenge in what becomes, like the end of the novel Dracula itself, a race to rescue some of their own who have fallen into lethal hands. The plot twists and turns, coils and recoils. Quite a ride. Hang on! This is a much darker, complex, and ambitious set of Adler books than Douglas' excellent earlier entries in the series (one was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), but it's based on historical fact beneath the fictional embellishments and provides a lot of insight on the thinking and even politics of the times. And even some of the series traditional humor shines through, as the very Victorian Nell encounters the worst of the real world in any age, and learns that she can face up to it. I must admit that she's a favorite character of mine, despite and maybe because of her socially inbred primness, and it's a pleasure to watch her grow. She may even be up to getting it on with dashing spy Quentin in future adventures. . . . Their relationship reminds me of the one between unconventional Victorian explorer/adventurer Richard Burton and his tradtional wife. Go, girl, go!
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