Today was a fun Holmesian night with an online conversation between writer Larry Millett and Tim Johnson discussing Millett’s latest book Rafferty’s Last Case and hosted by SubText Books bookstore.
Here is the official blurb:
“SubText Books is pleased to present a virtual event with Larry Millett on Thursday, April 21st at 7pm to celebrate Rafferty’s Last Case, the ninth and final installment in Millett’s Minnesota mystery series. Millett will be in conversation with Tim Johnson, Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at University of Minnesota Libraries.
About Rafferty’s Last Case:
“Richly woven and sprinkled with moments of humor and pathos, Rafferty’s Last Case is maybe his best case. The genius of Larry Millett’s adventures is how he weaves local history, culture, personalities, architecture, and the Holmes canon together in a way that finds me always asking for more. His final account of the late, great Shadwell Rafferty hooked me from the start. An ultimate triumph!” –Tim Johnson, Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections, University of Minnesota Libraries
Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty’s death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world’s most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend’s killer.
Set amid the glittering society and sordid underworld of 1928 St. Paul, Larry Millett’s ninth and final Shadwell Rafferty mystery takes readers through the serpentine twists of Rafferty’s fatal investigation, even as Holmes, following in Rafferty’s tracks, may be closing in on the answer to both cases. This ingenious double mystery takes us to every corner of St. Paul, from the city’s most notorious speakeasy to a home for unwed mothers to the mansions of Summit Avenue, and at every turn we find another suspect: an ambitious mayor and his devoted fixer-in-chief, a heartless blackmailer and a police detective mired in city hall connections, a poet-turned-mystery writer with a suspicious coterie, and a priest hiding a terrible secret. A mysterious woman in Minneapolis who makes certain illicit arrangements and a young man in possession of incriminating documents provide Holmes with vital clues that lead to a final confrontation with an exceptionally devious murderer worthy of the exceptionally devious plot that brings the Minnesota mystery series to a fitting and powerful conclusion” (https://www.crowdcast.io/e/larry-millett-for/register).
