Inside a momentous amount of British history, Donald Thomas’ latest Sherlock Holmes adventure pits the great detective and his faithful biographer, Dr. John Watson, against an international conspiracy led by a disgraced British officer. Colonel Hunter Moran bears upon him the “Mark of the Beast”; his satanic ingenuity leaves a magnificent path of devastation. It operates through the annihilation of the British armored column by Zulu tribesmen-armed only with shields and spears-to a life-and-death struggle about Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty’s Secret Program over the sinking passenger steamer Comtesse de Flandre.

The heir to the French empire lays dead in the African dust. Europe is taken to the brink of war by forged dispatches, made to enrich gun-runners and assassins. The precious metal fields and gemstone mines of South Africa end up being the playground of arranged crime. Only the detective genius of Holmes can show a match for the unfolding criminality of Moran and his affiliates. With Watson and Mycroft at his side, Sherlock Holmes again demonstrates that even though powers of the state as well as the underworld may try to overpower him, they will by no means out-think his splendid analytical mind at the height of its forces.