MYSTERY OF BRIONY LODGE

221b Baker St., London, early 1890s. For three Victorian slackers to say nothing of their dog becoming Sherlock Holmes's neighbours is very nearly the death of them. Jerome and his friends are planning a jaunt when Miss Briony Lodge calls at Baker Street. The beautiful young schoolmistress is in deadly danger. But what match are a bank clerk, a lawyer's assistant, a dog and a novelist for an international gang of desperadoes? None whatsoever. It would take an intellect of Sherlock Holmes's proportions to set things to rights. Or maybe, perhaps, an otter. In this mash-up of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jerome K. Jerome, their best-loved creations collide chaotically, with Mrs Hudson, as always, left to pick up the pieces. AUTHOR: Born in Walsall of Indian and Welsh stock, and educated there and at Oxford, David Bagchi is an academic now based in Hull. Starting out as a historical theologian he recently became, in what he describes as a shock career move, a theological historian. In 2010 he started pressing the wrong keys on his laptop, and two years later his first novel, a Tudor conspiracy thriller, won the TBS Novel Prize. The Mystery of Briony Lodge is his second work of fiction, and the first to be published. He lives in Brough, East Yorkshire.