Publisher's Synopsis
A weathered Cornish sailor has come to 221B Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes. He shares a tale so haunting and otherworldly that it seems to offer only one possible explanation, a supernatural one. William Berryman of the coal ship Mariah went to sea as a boy and is now an old man, but in all his years he has never experienced anything like he did in The Great Storm of '99 off the Cornish Coast. The storm drove his ship into the deadly "Manacles", a line of savage rock outcroppings that had already claimed over a thousand souls. He tells Holmes and Watson that only nine of nineteen men survived the shipwreck in a lifeboat upon the dark, storm-tossed sea, only nine! Then the man shocks them by declaring that he and his mates want Holmes to find out who "The Tenth Man" was. He wasn't there when they launched the lifeboat and he wasn't there when they landed, but without his help, the sailor says, they would never have survived.
"So who was the tenth man?" Was he an Angel, as the survivors of the Mariah had come to believe, or is there a more earthly explanation? No one knows and only Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, can solve the puzzling mystery, but will he accept the case? Once again, the game is afoot and Holmes and Watson will soon find themselves in their most twisted mystery yet.
