Books by Larry Millett

The ninth and final Minnesota mystery, in which Shadwell Rafferty, with the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, may have solved his own murder¿   Like many mysteries, this one begins with a murder. But in this case the victim happens to be the detective, on the verge of revealing the culprit in an earlier crime. Had Shadwell Rafferty identified his own murderer? When news of Rafferty’s death reaches Sherlock Holmes, in Chicago on the last leg of an American speaking tour, the world’s most famous detective and his redoubtable companion Watson rush to Minnesota to hunt for their friend’s killer.   Set amid the glittering society and sordid underworld of 1928 St. Paul, Larry Millett’s ninth and final Shadwell Rafferty mystery takes readers through the serpentine twists of Rafferty’s fatal investigation, even as Holmes, following in Rafferty’s tracks, may be closing in on the answer to both cases. This ingenious double mystery takes us to every corner of St. Paul, from the city’s most notorious speakeasy to a home for unwed mothers to the mansions of Summit Avenue, and at every turn we find another suspect: an ambitious mayor and his devoted fixer-in-chief, a heartless blackmailer and a police detective mired in city hall connections, a poet-turned-mystery writer with a suspicious coterie, and a priest hiding a terrible secret.   A mysterious woman in Minneapolis who makes certain illicit arrangements and a young man in possession of incriminating documents provide Holmes with vital clues that lead to a final confrontation with an exceptionally devious murderer worthy of the exceptionally devious plot that brings the Minnesota mystery series to a fitting and powerful conclusion.

The thrilling sixth novel in local historian Larry Millett's renowned mystery series.

For the first time in English, the father of the shopping mall" tells his life story"

The story of one of Minnesota’s most famous and most mourned buildings, set against the history of downtown Minneapolis When it opened in 1890, the twelve-story Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building was the tallest, largest, and most splendid commercial structure in Minneapolis—a mighty stone skyscraper built for the ages. How this grand Richardsonian Romanesque edifice, which later came to be called the Metropolitan Building, rose with the growth of Minneapolis only to fall in the throes of the city’s postwar renewal, is revealed in Metropolitan Dreams in all its scandalous intrigue. It is a tale of urban growing pains and architectural ghosts and of colorful, sometimes criminal characters amid the grandeur and squalor of building and rebuilding a city’s skyline.Against the thrumming backdrop of turn-of-the-century Minneapolis, architectural critic and historian Larry Millett recreates the impressive rise of the massive office building, its walls of green New Hampshire granite and red Lake Superior sandstone surrounding its true architectural wonder, a dazzling twelve-story iron and glass light court. The drama, however, was far from confined to the building itself. A consummate storyteller, Millett summons the frenetic atmosphere in Gilded Age Minneapolis that encouraged the likes of Northwestern Guaranty’s founder, real estate speculator Louis Menage, whose shady deals financed this Minneapolis masterpiece—and then forced him to flee both prosecution and the country a mere three years later.Dubious as its financial beginnings might have been, the economic circumstances of the Metropolitan’s demise were at least as questionable. Anchoring Minneapolis’s historic Gateway District in its heyday, the building’s fortunes shifted with the city’s demographics and finally it fell victim to the fervor of one of the largest downtown urban renewal projects ever undertaken in the United States. Though the long and furious battle to save the Metropolitan ultimately failed in 1962, its ghost persists in the passion for historic preservation stirred by its demise—and in Metropolitan Dreams, whose photographs, architectural drawings, and absorbing narrative bring the building and its story to vibrant, enduring life.

Take a tour of the lost mansions of the Twin Cities

Shadwell Rafferty crosses the river to Minneapolis to investigate murder and corruption with the help of Holmes and Watson

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson come to Minnesota, on the trail of the famous Kensington Rune Stone

The first novel in the series that brought Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John D. Watson to turn-of-the-century Minnesota.

When one of St. Paul's wealthiest scions loses his head-literally-it's up to Holmes and Watson to track a cold-blooded killer.