The mystery novel Holmes, Marple & Poe (2024) is the first in a series of the same name by American author James Patterson and American television writer Brian Sitts. Patterson, a mainstay in the mystery and thriller genres, has written or co-written over 200 novels. Sitts has been his sometime collaborator.

Holmes, Marple & Poe re-imagines canonic English literary detectives Miss Jane Marple (created by Agatha Christie) and Sherlock Holmes (created by Arthur Conan Doyle) and features a fictionalized version of American detective fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe. In the novel, they work together in a private investigative firm in modern-day New York City.

This guide refers to the 2024 Hachette e-book edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss drug addiction and overdose, panic attacks, kidnapping, nonconsensual drugging, incest (and an implied relationship between an adult and minor), intimate partner violence, gun violence, mutilation of corpses, police violence, attempted death by suicide, and murder.

Plot Summary

Detectives Margaret Marple, Auguste Poe, and Brendan Holmes agree to buy a Brooklyn industrial space that was the site of the unsolved murder of Mary McShane decades prior.

A year later, the trio insists on an audience with Police Commissioner Jack Boolin. They have located the body of Sloane Stone, a high-profile victim of murder. They reveal that Sloane was killed by Kristin Rove, the New York City mayor’s special assistant. Kristin was jealous of Sloane’s sexual relationship with Mayor Felix Rollins. When the press learns of Marple, Holmes, and Poe’s involvement, the three detectives have more business than they can handle.

Shortly thereafter, the three are hired to recover a stolen Shakespeare First Folio and Gutenberg Bible previously owned by billionaire Huntley Bain. They charge Bain an exorbitant fee for their services. Later in the novel, it is revealed that Holmes, Marple, and Poe stole the volumes themselves, as Bain lacked appreciation for the tomes’ literary value.

Soon after, they’re hired by Addilyn Charles, whose wealthy husband, Eton, has disappeared with Addilyn’s daughter, Zozi Turner. Marple visits Zozi’s school, where one of her classmates seems suspicious. The classmate is later revealed to have aided in Zozi’s fake kidnapping: In reality, Zozi ran away with her stepfather, as the two are sexually involved.

A young woman named Lucy Ferry arrives in New York, where she begins a modeling career. Detective Lieutenant Helene Grey, the detectives’ police contact, informs them that numerous bodies have been found in an abandoned subway tunnel. The surgical dismemberment of the bodies indicates that they were murdered, with the crimes going back decades. Marple, meanwhile, studies their building’s cold case, the murder of Mary McShane in 1954. When a mouse frightens Marple, Poe adopts a cat, leading him to hire the animal shelter employee, Virginia, as the firm’s assistant.

After Holmes takes heroin one evening, he wakes to find that he has been robbed and recognizes the danger of his drug use. Poe, meanwhile, drinks alcohol when reminded of his late romantic partner, Annie. Holmes’s contacts in the art forgery world lead Marple to meet art thief Luka Franke; when she has proof of his crimes, she uses it to convince him to help them find the thief of Bain’s literary works. Grey and Poe begin a romantic relationship.

While searching for leads on Zozi’s disappearance, Marple sees a man wearing cowboy apparel on Hart Island, where unclaimed bodies are buried. He flees in a white pickup truck with a Texas decal. Marple later learns that this is Lucy’s ex-boyfriend and killer.

Poe hacks a New York Police Department (NYPD) database to aggregate information about potential victims in the subway tunnel discovery. Commissioner Boolin catches him and demands that the investigators collaborate with the NYPD or face charges for the illegal acquisition of information.

When an intoxicated Poe recognizes a house from their case files, Marple leverages her contact with a judge to get a search warrant for the house, which is owned by brothers Richard and Nelson Siglik. Holmes takes heroin before the team goes into the house; he overdoses, is revived by Marple, and refuses further medical attention. They discover a pit beneath the Siglik funeral home. Many people are chained up within, but Eton and Zozi are not among them. Holmes and Poe chase the Sigliks through a series of tunnels before apprehending them. The brothers learned to kill and dismember bodies from their father, who learned from their grandfather, which accounts for the long history of the corpses in the tunnel.

Marple goes to a ransom drop-off with Addilyn. She, Holmes, and Poe then follow a tracker planted in the ransomed jewelry to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where they find Zozi in a motel with her stepfather (and sexual partner), Eton. Holmes, who has again taken heroin, shoots himself in the head, though not fatally. His partners take him to the hospital, promising to get him help.

Grey, intrigued by the mysterious origins of the three private investigators, asks a contact at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to investigate their backgrounds, though she gives up the search when she cannot learn anything conclusive. She decides to resume her sexual relationship with Poe despite this mystery. Grey gets an envelope full of evidence about Bain Enterprises’ financial crimes, which leads to Bain’s arrest and Mayor Rollins’s disgrace, as Bain illegally contributed to Rollins’s campaign. The discovery of a bloody bread knife in the team’s Brooklyn office leads them to conclude that Mary McShane was the first Siglik victim.

Holmes, Marple, and Poe are abducted by the police, where they are reprimanded by Boolin and Rollins until Marple cites the legality of the investigators’ actions.

A mother and son find Lucy’s body while kayaking. Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, Carson, has also disappeared; he is the “cowboy” Marple saw. Marple and Grey track him to a cheap hotel, where they arrest him. Luka Franke, meanwhile, accuses Holmes, Marple, and Poe of the Bain theft, though he cannot prove it. Marple returns Lucy’s ashes to her family in Texas and finds that Lucy was an Agatha Christie fan, causing Marple to mysteriously imply that she is not truly “Margaret Marple.”