| "A story for which the world is not yet prepared." In these words Dr. John Watson, in The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, describes the legend of Harat, the gigantic rat who ruled over the nation of Bada and its "people who were not human." Their story, hidden for more than a century in Dr. Watson's dispatch box, is now told at lastùin a tale as compelling and colorful as any in the Holmes canon. What begins with a brutal "impossible" murder in a dreary London rooming house soon draws the celebrated master of detection, Sherlock Holmes, and his companion, Dr. Watson, into a hunt that takes them from England to Egypt, to India, and on to Singapore before encountering Harat, a creature even more appalling than his crimes. Along their way they contend with formidable foes, some of them inhuman, others all-too-human, and none so cunning and ruthless as the colonial master of Singapore, Lord Barington, who enlists the full weight of the English aristocracy to maintain his corrupt rule. Still, in Captain MacDougall, the full-blooded African who has penetrated deeply into the Bada's mysteries, Holmes and Watson find an able ally, as they do in the exquisite Widow Han, keeper of the secrets of Singapore, whose wiles threaten to undo the inscrutable sleuth's defenses against the fair sex. To solve the case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, Holmes must call upon all his resourcesùthe arts of deduction and survival, the force of intellect, and the power of pure instinctùfor otherwise he shall meet certain death. |
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