Rising War Office star Mycroft Holmes persuades his brother, Sherlock, to volunteer at a friend's orphanage, where the suspicious death of a street urchin and a mysterious Chinese woman lead the brothers into the London opium trade's dark underside.

Maintaining tenuous contact only by means of coded messages and cryptic notes with her husband, Sherlock Holmes, and with Holmes' young granddaughter in her safekeeping, Russell will have to call on instincts she didn't know she had as the famous husband and wife sleuths are pursued by a killer immune from the sting of justice.

In his sixth adventure, something sinister is afoot in the house in the west of Ireland in which young Sherlock is staying.

"A heatwave melts London as Holmes and Watson are called to action in this new Sherlock Holmes adventure by Bonnie MacBird, author of "one of the best Sherlock Holmes novels of recent memory." In the West End, a renowned Italian escape artist dies spectacularly on stage during a performance -- immolated in a gleaming copper cauldron of his wife's design. In Cambridge, the runaway daughter of a famous don is found drowned, her long blonde hair tangled...