The Sceptred Isle Club

Retired Georgia sheriff John Le Brun had conceived his 1905 trip to London as an opportunity to test his intellect in "the hub of the learned world." He hadn't expected to also tackle a locked-room puzzle with international implications.

Set six years after the murder among moguls recounted in Brent Monahan's The Jekyl Island Club, this second Le Brun adventure shows the intuitive, lone-wolf lawman having lost none of his investigative prowess to advancing age. On hand to discover four men massacred in the gambling room of the exclusive Sceptred Isle Club, he finds that chamber's inside door bolted, and no sign of either a weapon or the money being wagered. When a small fortune is unearthed from a local policeman's garden, the case appears closed. Le Brun, though, isn't convinced. So, with assistance from Sherlock Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--wonderfully rendered here as an adventure-loving adulterer--and despite the distraction of a beguiling young coquette, he pursues his own solution, linking the killings to a longevity pool and the fight for Irish self-governance.

The Sceptred Isle Club's plot is rather conventional and slow to boil, and it reveals a twist from Jekyl Island, so these books should be read in order. Yet this yarn captivates with its Edwardian high-society atmospherics, frequent humor, and the conscientious development of Le Brun, a disarmingly keen, frontier-style sleuth. The only mystery left at the end of Monahan's novel is where his ex-sheriff will go "clubbing" next. --J. Kingston Pierce