Snake Bite

In Snake Bite, the fifth book in Andrew Lane's Young Sherlock Holmes series, a teenage Sherlock is kidnapped by the Paradol Chamber and shipped aboard the Gloria Scott toward China. On the voyage he befriends the ship's cook, Wu Chung, who teaches him to cook and practice tai chi — skills that prove vital when pirates attack the ship.

Ashore in Shanghai, Sherlock is drawn into a mystery: how can three men be bitten by the same species of poisonous snake in different parts of the city, and who wants them dead? Working with Cameron Mackenzie and Wu Fung-Yi, he follows a trail that leads through a hidden cipher to a plot against an American warship. Set decades before the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, the series imagines Holmes's teenage apprenticeship in deduction and danger.