Castle Rouge: An Irene Adler Novel
Blend Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes with Dracula lore, toss in a  copious complement of czarist Russian history, and the result is Carole Nelson  Douglas'sCastle Rouge, her grisly but gripping sequel to 2001'sChapel Noir.Disaster has struck opera diva-turned-detective Irene Adler Norton. The American  adventuress who bested Holmes and thereby won his admiration (in "A Scandal in  Bohemia") thought she'd cornered the elusive Ripper on the grounds of the 1889  world's fair in Paris, but instead, he fled to Eastern Europe after kidnapping  her friend and biographer, Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh. Now, while Irene--assisted  by theatrical manager Bram Stoker, daredevil Yankee reporter Nellie "Pink" Bly,  and British spy Quentin Stanhope--sets out for Prague, hoping to rescue Nell,  and as Holmes and Dr. John Watson revisit Saucy Jack's earlier homicidal  activities in London, Nell finds herself imprisoned, together with Irene's  barrister husband, in a crumbling Transylvanian castle, under the malevolent  scrutiny of a Russian woman agent and a brutish lust-murderer endowed with  hypnotic powers.Douglas builds considerable intrigue on her way to a surprising solution to the  Ripper's identity. Yet it's unfortunate that this sixth Irene Adler yarn focuses  more on the prudish Nell and her discomforts as a hostage (no proper corsets-- how shocking!) than on its more intrepid chief protagonist, or even on Pink,  whose capacity for audacious exploits was better realized inChapel Noir.  Regrettable, too, is the plot's shift from Paris to the eldritch extremes of  Bohemia. Stoker points out that "the region reeks with bizarre legend and  folktales," yetCastle Rouge's action takes place well apart from the  Gypsy villages that might have provided cultural color.--J. Kingston  Pierce