The notched hairpin, and the short story, the enchanted garden

Brilliant detective Mycroft Holmes—Sherlock’s older brother—tackles cases beyond life and death in this reimagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic mystery series. When London grows stifling, Mycroft Holmes and his assistant, Sydney Silchester, flee to the English countryside. They rent a charming little house whose sprawling garden boasts a pond, trees, sculpture—and an irresistible mystery. When a dead man is found in the backyard, sitting in the carved throne that forms the garden’s centerpiece, an antique hairpin buried deep in his chest, the official verdict is suicide. But Mycroft can’t imagine a man could stab himself in the heart. Vacation is over before it’s begun; the game is afoot. The death in the garden is only the beginning. This mystery will take Mycroft and Sydney deeper into the underworld of Victorian England than Sherlock Holmes and John Watson ever dared to tread. Unraveling the incident in the backyard will mean understanding more than a simple murder; it will force Mycroft and Silchester to confront the nature of mystery itself. An elegantly constructed golden-age mystery, The Notched Hairpin is a brilliant intellectual investigation of what makes detective stories tick. Author H. F. Heard entrances and amazes fans of Victorian adventures with a mystery-solving duo that can more than hold its own against Sherlock and Watson. The Notched Hairpin is the 3rd book in the Mycroft Holmes Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order. "The setting is simplicity itself. Here is a lovely arbor in a quiet Shropshire garden. There lies the body of a man killed by the thrust of a slender instrument identifiable as an antique hairpin. Was it really suicide, as Mr. Mycroft's colleague believes? In his quest for the answer, Mr. Mycroft takes us from the antiquarian gentility of twin Shropshire houses, through the haunts of a munitions runner and 'hotels' of prostitution, to the continent-wide reaches of the slave trade. With him go his friends, among them a murderer, exploring, in the depths of the human mind and soul, motivations and events more uncanny and more sinister than the gentle lady (whose coil of hair the notched hairpin origianlly must have held) could ever have dreamed of."--Page 4 of cover