Valley of Fear

A cipher message, a murder at a moated manor house in Sussex with the victim''s face destroyed by a shotgun, and then — halfway through — the book stops and goes to a Pennsylvania coal valley, where a secret society runs the mines by terror. Conan Doyle took the second half from the real Molly Maguires and the Pinkerton who broke them; this is the last Holmes novel, and the two halves are one story. Thirty-nine plates of moonlit bridges and stormy landscapes by John Atkinson Grimshaw and Theodor Hildebrandt run alongside the text, matching the novel''s dark crossings from Sussex to the coal valleys.