At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England, Sherlock Holmes and his nineteen year old apprentice, Mary Russell, enter British occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes enigmatic brother Mycroft. A rash of murders there seems unrelated to the growing tensions among Jew, Moslem and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant he must reconstruct the most recent one in the desert gully where it occurred. Their singular findings will lead him and Russell through labyrinthine bazaars, verminous hovels, cliff-hung monasteries - and into mortal danger...

Kate Martinelli, a recently promoted homicide detective, and Alonzo Hawkin, a world-weary cop trying to make a new life in San Francisco, could not be more different but are thrown together to solve a brutal crime - the murders of three young girls. Their search takes them to a rural colony, close to the place where the bodies were found. Here they meet the enigmatic artist, Vaun, who is hiding a terrible secret from her past and her real identity. As Martinelli and Hawkin get nearer to a solution, they realize the crimes may not be the sexually motivated killings they had seemed. There is a cold, calculating and tortuous mind at work which they must outmanoeuvre if they are to prevent further carnage and the destruction of a shining talent