Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

Starred review from August 5, 2019
Purser-Hallard (The Pendragon Protocol) delivers one of the cleverest locked room mysteries ever tackled by Sherlock Holmes. In 1896, Thomas Kellway, who asserts that he has telekinetic powers (and that he has been “remotely influenced since before his birth by superior intelligences” from the planet Venus), approaches Sir Newnham Speight, the chairman of the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Psychical Phenomena, who has offered £10,000 to anyone who can demonstrate a psychic ability to the satisfaction of the society’s leaders. In a controlled experiment, Kellway is locked one night in a small room next to a second locked room containing a ball in a box that he will attempt to move with his mind. Despite Kellway’s room being watched at regular five-minute intervals by two-person teams, he somehow vanishes, leaving Speight to wonder whether he’s encountered a genuine claimant—or a brilliant hoaxer. Speight enlists Holmes and Watson to uncover the truth. John Dickson Carr and Anthony Boucher fans will be gratified at the logical explanation the master rationalist devises. This ranks among the top novel-length Sherlock Holmes pastiches.