(2008, Touchstone, 289 pages, $14, paperback)

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At last, I find a new story and cast of characters after my own heart — albeit with a Sicilian dagger.

This is the fifth in a series of historical mysteries set in England in the 1880s. The heroes, Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn, would have been contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson (no relation to yours truly, although that happens to be the same name as my father, and my grandfather was a doctor — of veterinary medicine). Also, Barker and Llewelyn bear a surface resemblance to the venerable duo.

But while Holmes shows his remarkable mental acumen (e.g., concluding people’s activities from pet hair on a pant-leg) regularly throughout a story, Barker, who plays the lead sleuth in this series, spends much of this story, at least, teaching his apprentice, Llewelyn, about the sociology of London’s underworld.

And that’s just fine with me.

We’ve all read enough pastiches of Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. They’ve been fun, but the world needs new heroes, and I do believe Will Thomas has given us a pair worthy of our attention.

Cyrus Barker is a former merchant ship’s captain who retains his old ship, the Osprey, and his contacts among seamen, despite having taken to land as a “private enquiry agent.”

Barker’s a tall, staunch, Baptist Scot who happens to know various Chinese martial arts and always wears dark-tinted spectacles.

Llewelyn is a small, brave, twenty-something Welshman, a Samwise Gamgee to Barker’s Frodo Baggins.

In this adventure — it’s more adventure than mystery, which was often the case with the Holmes books — Barker and Llewelyn are persuaded by the Home Office to do something about the Mafia’s imminent takeover of the London docks. Whitehall fears that this then-new organized crime plague could turn the British Isles into a more profitably corrupt version of Sicily.

The grisly killings, preceded by epistles bearing a black hand print, continue until a grand battle draws the capo of the nascent mob out in the open, so Barker and Llewelyn can deal with him in the flesh.

It’s light fun, spiced with the kind of historic and geographic trivia that make Nevada Barr’s Anna Pidgeon mysteries so much fun.

I look forward to reading the whole series.