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...

As southern Africa is torn apart by a so-called 'white man's war', Dallas Granger-Acheson and his beloved wife Lorna are caught up in the conflict between fiercely proud descendents of Dutch settlers and the might of Britain's colonial empire. At stake, possession of a land rich in resources.