Castle Shade introduced me to the author, and to her novels, which I will likely be reading more of, as a result of this book. Sherlock Holmes, and his wife, Russell, are hired by Queen Marie to investigate threats made to her daughter. They find a hex bag, and a pearl, which supposedly come from Marie's pearl necklace. Both are intended to harm the queen. Someone is using these smears to get at the queen, attempting to ruin her reputation, in a land famous for witches and vampires i.e. Roumania or Romania as it is now known. There are a number of suspects, and I will not reveal the ending, of course. But the characters are well drawn and I found it to be a real page turner, which moved along rapidly. I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who likes a good mystery, and a Sherlock Holmes mystery is quite irresistible anyway.

I try not to come into a series late,but unfortunately ,with this,I did.
So it took a while to get my head around the idea that Sherlock was married,and to such a young woman.
The storyline itself was fun,who doesn't love a bit of vampires and stories of noble folk who bathe in bloodbath? I felt very little spark or chemistry between the characters.
In fact Sherlock seemed quite absent for the most part.
It was an OK read for me,and know this is probably due to not having read earlier books,so rounding up to three stars.