'Human Beings are the only animals that kill for ideas'

LAURENS VAN DER POST

'Every murder is committed with a thousand years of premeditation'

MILORAD PAVIC

An American professor discovers the diaries of John Ledbury, known as the counterfeit detective, a minor poet who, in Victorian London, is employed to reply to the mail that comes addressed to Sherlock Holmes at 221b Baker Street. Through the diaries he unearths a series of baffling unsolved murders. He travels through England and Scotland but he realizes that, in order to solve the mystery, he has to travel further, back through time itself.

THE COUNTERFEIT DETECTIVE is an epic Gothic literary crime thriller set mostly in Victorian London in 1900 but also in 1970s England, Scotland and the United States.

SIMPSON GREARS is the crime-writing name of the writer Ian Simpson Grears Spring. His collection of short stories, The Foot of the Walk Murders, was longlisted for a prestigious Dagger award by the Crime Writers Association in 2021.