Spider Dance (Irene Adler Series #8) by Carole Nelson Douglas

From the Publisher

Opera singer. Adventuress. American abroad. Irene Adler is all of this...and is also the only woman to ever have outwitted the great man, Sherlock Holmes.

After numerous adventures Irene has finally come home, not out of loyalty to her native shores but because of a baffling puzzle, and the one thing that haunts her. Irene has no real memory of her childhood and has spent most of her life creating a persona to fit her passions. When Daredevil reporter Nelly Bly lures Irene to America by hinting that she knows of Irene's parentage, Irene takes the bait and in doing so, embarks upon a pursuit of the most notorious woman of the nineteenth century.

Before the intrigue-ridden quest is over, Irene will uncover murderous international political conspiracies, lost treasure, and finally . . . the full, shocking secret of her birth.

Publishers Weekly

The game's afoot and dancing in Douglas's eighth historical thriller featuring the dynamic Irene Adler Norton, her able assistant Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh and that clever human bloodhound, Sherlock Holmes. At the end of their last adventure (2003's Femme Fatale), set in New York, Holmes suggested that "Mrs. Eliza Gilbert"-a name on a tombstone-may actually belong to Norton's mother. While an elderly cleric's brutal murder at William K. Vanderbilt's Fifth Avenue mansion occupies Holmes, Norton discovers that Gilbert is Lola Montez, the fabled "Spanish dancer" whose ill-fated romance with King Ludwig of Bavaria made her fodder for the gossip columns in the pre-Civil War era. When the two investigations intersect, Norton and Holmes find they must cooperate with each other. Emotion as well as logic figures in solving the dual mysteries of the cleric's murder and Norton's birth. Witty, fast-paced and meticulously researched, this sepia-tinted Victorian confection also reflects a contemporary sensibility as it ponders religious fanaticism and the challenges of a female celebrity living by her own rules. If indeed this is the last of the series, as the author has indicated, it closes on a definite high note. Agent, Howard Morhaim. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The only woman to capture Sherlock Holmes's regard again fascinates him, this time in 1889. At Holmes's instigation, Irene Adler is drawn to Brooklyn's Green-Wood cemetery and the grave of Eliza Gilbert, who died 30 years earlier. Could this poor soul lead her to the identity of the Woman in Black, the mother who abandoned her to an acting troupe when she was a toddler? With her husband Godfrey off in Bavaria on assignment for Baron Rothschild, Irene and her companion, starchy ex-governess Nell Huxleigh, trace Gilbert's history, discovering that she was the infamous entertainer and courtesan Lola Montez, whose deathbed conversion to saintliness was witnessed by Episcopalian cleric Father Hawks, now dead himself on the billiard table of William K. Vanderbilt. While Holmes concentrates on the murder, Irene and Nell continue tracking Lola, with semiromantic interludes between Nell and British secret agent Quentin Stanhope, who is now assisting intrepid girl reporter Nellie "Pink" Bly as she uncovers a massive baby-buying scandal. Everyone slips in and out of disguise, and more skullduggery is afoot: Vanderbilt's daughter Consuela is abducted, another cleric is tortured, and three cloaked figures (Jesuits? Ultramontanes?) waylay everyone. Will Irene learn who her mother was, or simply come to terms with not knowing? Like its seven predecessors (Femme Fatale, 2003, etc.), a paean to women's audacity, pugnacity and street smarts, told with frisky good humor and nicely integrated historical asides: Bellevue's eminence, Mesmer's skills, Delmonico's menus.

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