With a case as confounding as any in the original Holmes canon and a tale so terrifying it lay hidden for more than a century in Dr. Watson's dispatch box, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra begins familiarly enough. Elizabeth Trent, a bereft widow determined to clear her husband's name of both suicide and embezzlement, visits literature's most celebrated detective at his Baker Street flat. Within hours, though, Mrs. Trent herself is dead, and her curious suicide note draws Holmes and Watson into a hunt for a brutal murderer that takes them from England to Egypt, to India, and...

In a crafty new novel featuring the world's greatest literary detective, Alan Vanneman extends the boundaries of the Sherlock Holmes canon with an investigation that takes the celebrated sleuth and his cohort Dr. Watson far from the cozy Victorian comforts of 221B Baker Street. Indeed, enjoying the luxuries of the Orient Express, they travel the breadth of fin de siecle Europe to exotic Constantinople, though not strictly in pursuit of pleasure. For death, too, is traveling first class. The mystery begins familiarly enough in London, in the middle of the night. Holmes and Watson are summoned...

Author Author contains two short stories and a novella, with famous authors as the leading characters. In "The Transfiguration of W. H. Auden," the great poet dies and goes, not to heaven, but someplace better. Victorian England In "The Man Who Met Joyce Carol Oates," an admirer discovers that encountering genius is not without peril. In "The Apotheosis of John Updike," the poet of suburbia encounters catharses without number west of the Hudson. Alan Vanneman is the author of Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara. He also writes online film...

A World of Mung That's what they called Kolnap, a sorry sack of methane mush, the least glorious posting in the entire Nardan Confederation, a good thirty years' freeze from the nearest "civilized" planet. Careers were lost on Kolnap, not made, until one cockroach had the courage to make a difference, had the abdomen to stand up and join claws across the species, daring the embrace of the temptress grasshopper Nayluu and building an alliance with his ant sergeant, Orkan. Together they rewrote the history of Kolnap, a history forged in the soul of the roach of roaches, the roach they called...