It is October 1921. Dr John Watson, now almost seventy, has accustomed himself to a life of retirement. He is surprised, then, to encounter his old friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, rising out of the early evening mist like a wraith.
1892. At the heart of Tibet, a world away from London, where a grieving Dr Watson is battling demons of his own, stands an ancient monastery, abandoned for generations but now the source of rumors of the most peculiar and terrible kind.
Holmes was once an infant, his childhood as fraught with peril as his adult life. That time, long past, still haunts him - most of all, the figure of a stranger, standing without and gazing upwards, his thin, pale face haloed by moonlight.
A murderer in Pargetter Square, with the detective and a tyrant come face to face in Baker Street, with desperate ambition and wickedness incarnate, with an assassin's bullet and with old friends working, unknowingly, as one.