It's 1898. Kismet brings about a chance reunion at a London club between Dr. Watson and Colonel "Maiwand Mike" Fenlon, former military comrades from their Northwest Frontier days and the desperate Battle of Maiwand. A week later an urgent cable seeking Sherlock Holmes's help arrives from the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency 30 miles off the coast of Normandy. A retired high-ranking British Indian Army officer who commanded the troops at Maiwand has dropped dead. Colonel Fenlon is in a holding cell awaiting trial for his murder.What role in the Brigadier-General's death was played by a phial of patent medicine developed in India to treat cholera? Why are Colonel Fenlon's forefinger and thumbprint on the neck of the phial when he swears he has never seen it before?Above all, why is Fenlon refusing to enter a plea or even to tell his Defence counsel what took place the evening the Brigadier-General dropped dead?

In the year 1903 - the exact moment is now lost to history - Sherlock Holmes proclaimed to the world he was quitting England's Capital to go into retirement on a small, wind-swept farm in the Sussex South Downs. His shocked comrade-in-arms Dr. John H. Watson was later to write, 'The decision took me utterly by surprise. I thought I had become an institution around Holmes, like his Stradivarius, or the old, oily black clay pipe and his index books.' Reluctantly Watson wrote up three recent cases yet unpublished and returned to his medical practice. Holmes retirement didn't last long. Once more his faithful Amanuensis Watson took up his pen - and his Army Service revolver. The result was three more of the most intriguing cases ever undertaken by the famous pair. All six adventures have now been brought together in this special edition. A Most Diabolical Plot. 'Not 'til the day the bugle blows for me shall I forget the most diabolical attempt ever made on my friend Sherlock...

It's the year 1900. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson receive an urgent commission from the Prince Regnant of Bulgaria to come to Sofia. The Codex Zographensis, the most ancient and most sacred manuscript in the Old Bulgarian language has been stolen. Its disappearance could lead to the outbreak of war between Russia, Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans, three ageing empires disintegrating like great suns on every side of the Balkans. What follows is an extraordinary story of duplicity, murder, vampires and greed for vast estates in Bulgaria and Hungary, with the fate of millions in Sherlock Holmes' hands.

It's the year 1906. Rumours abound that a deadly plot is hatching - not in the fog-ridden back-alleys of London's Limehouse district or the sinister Devon moors of the Hound of the Baskervilles but in faraway Peking. Holmes's task - discover whether such a plot exists and if so, foil it. But are the assassins targeting the young and progressive Ch'ing Emperor or his imperious aunt, the fearsome Empress Dowager Cixi? The murder of either could spark a civil war. The fate of China and the interests of Britain's vast Empire in the Orient could be at stake. Holmes and Watson take up the mission with their customary confidence – until they find they are no longer in the familiar landscapes of Edwardian England. Instead, they tumble into the Alice In Wonderland world of the Forbidden City.

The Dean of a Swiss university persuades Sherlock Holmes to investigate the background of a would-be lecturer. To Dr. Watson it seems a very humdrum commission - but who is the mysterious 'Lieserl'? How does her existence threaten the ambitions of the technical assistant level III in Room 86 at the Federal Patents Office in Berne by the name of Albert Einstein? The assignment plunges Holmes and Watson into unfathomable Serbia to solve one of the intractable mysteries of the 20th Century. In Tim Symonds' previous detective novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer At Scotney Castle and Sherlock Holmes And The Case Of The Bulgarian Codex the author based pivotal historic facts and a principal character on real life. So too in this new mystery.

In Sherlock Holmes and The Dead Boer at Scotney Castle the great consulting detective comes up against the rich and powerful Kipling League. Dr Watson recounts the extraordinary events which took place on a spacious early summer day in the Sussex and Kent countryside in 1904. None of the earlier stories chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes compares to the strange circumstances which determined Watson to take up his pen to relate this extraordinary adventure against Holmes express wishes.

It's 1906. Far from England, the Ottoman Empire ruled by the despotic Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid 11 is on the verge of imploding. Rival Great Powers, especially Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, sit watching like crows on a fence, ready to rush in to carve up the vast territories, menacing England's vital overland routes to her Indian possessions. At his medical practice in London's Marylebone Watson receives a mystifying telegram. It's from Holmes. 'Dear Watson, if you can throw physic to the dogs for an hour or two I would appreciate meeting at the stone cross at Charing Cross railway station tomorrow noon. I have an assignation with a bird lover at the Stork & Ostrich House in the Regents Park which has excited my curiosity. Yrs. S.H.'Watson finds the invitation puzzling. Why should such a mundane meeting at a Bird House excite the curiosity of Europe's most famous investigating detective or anyone else? For old times' sake Watson joins his old comrade-in-arms. Within days Holmes and...