During his first trip to England in 1899, murder was the last thing that Hamlin Garland, the so-called "Dean of American Letters," expected to find. More predictable were his descriptions of American baseball and visits with notables like Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw. Yet when Garland tells Sherlock Holmes of a suspicious death that occurred at Hearthstone Hall, the detective replies, "You have described the ingredients of a classic murder mystery-a dead dowager empress and a collection of courtiers any one of whom might be the killer." From the ominous confines of a gothic manor house to the foreboding terrain of the Devil's Punchbowl, Garland, Holmes, and Dr. Watson seek to thwart a cold-blooded killer before the list of victims expands any further.