The Adventuress

A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes

(Previously published without the Readers Guide as Good Morning, Irene.)

"Some women are just born to have grand adventures. Such a woman—"the" woman to the bewitched Sherlock Holmes—was the American actress Irene Adler, who shrugged off her untimely literary demise in "A Scandal in Bohemia" to reappear as the heroine of Carole Nelson Douglas's captivating history mystery, Good Night, Mr. Holmes. This vibrant creature is back, holding court in Paris and laughing up her fashionable sleeve at the rumors of her death....Irene [packs] up her entourage and repairs to Monaco [where] she dons clever disguises, takes up with sailors, advises the Crown Prince..., and takes a most amusing tea with Sarah Bernhardt. "Independence," Irene says, "does wonders for a woman."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

American diva/detective Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes, is honeymooning in Paris with her dashing barrister-husband, Godfrey Norton, when Irene and everyone’s favorite Victorian spinster, Nell Huxleigh, witness a drowned sailor’s tattooed body being recovered from the Seine. The women saw a similar tattoo on another drowned man. In London years earlier, Irene and Nell viewed the rescued-too-late corpse on the dining table of Bram Stoker, the man who would write Dracula. The trail of the tattoos soon has Irene unraveling a deadly mystery in Monaco, where she meets the principality’s first beautiful blond American princess and uncovers political and matrimonial treachery with the help of Godfrey, her new friend, Sarah Bernhardt, Irene’s faithful chronicler, Miss Penelope Huxleigh, and Sherlock Holmes himself.