The Sign of Ten

Victorian England, Portsmouth. At Clarendon House, «a boarding house for gentlemen with frayed nerves», a new lodger arrives — Charles Dodgson, already famous as Lewis Carroll, the author of «Alice in Wonderland», — and his nerves are very frayed. Charles Dodgson dreams ominous dreams — his own characters prophesy blood, death, and disasters of an unclear nature to him and his acquaintances, and these predictions come true again and again. Who better to turn to with such a mystery than Mr. X, who understands the underlying motivations of any human actions? This blind and mad anchorite, a singer of rationality, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes, uncovers terrifying secrets without leaving his room, relying solely on the power of deduction — but how will his new confrontation with the «Union of Ten» end?
José Carlos Somoza is a brilliant Spanish writer whose novels have been translated into several dozen languages, a laureate of the «Golden Dagger» award and the owner of numerous other literary prizes, creator of multilayered worlds where very dark deeds take place, author of fantastic, philosophical, historical thrillers and horrors. In «The Sign of Ten», the continuation of «A Study in Black Shades», the infernally perceptive Mr. X and his loyal, ironic, strong, and sensitive nurse Anne McCarthy return, and along with them, in an unpredictable intrigue, are involved actors, stagehands, and audiences of cruel underground theaters, renowned psychiatrists, and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle.
For the first time in Russian!