Original mysteryNo. 1432 hr 35 minSherlock Holmes
Yorkshire coast, November: a baronet is found dead in his locked study with salt water pooled near the hearth, seaweed pressed beneath the bolted door, and no earthly way in or out — for three consecutive nights before his death a bell tolled from beneath the sea, the drowned monks of Dunmere Abbey ringing judgment upon the house above the cliffs — and when Sherlock Holmes arrives he finds a replaced bell-pull with a new cord married to an old tassel, pale cave sand in a locked drawer, candle wax beneath the desk, the name of a long-wrecked ship no one will speak aloud, and a housekeeper whose thirty-two years of spotless loyalty may have been thirty-two years of waiting; entirely fictional in homage to classic detective fiction, The Bells of Dunmere Abbey is a locked-room mystery about guilt remembered, grief obeyed, and the human habit of dressing wickedness in a shroud when plain clothes would do.
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