Foreword

June 1887

The celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee are coming to a climax. On the 21st of June, she will lead a procession of more than fifty kings and princes from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, and there join the peers of the realm, foreign monarchs, and heads of state in a Service of Thanksgiving.

After the defeat of the Irish Home Rule Bill, it is widely believed that Ireland will gain her independence from Britain only through violent rebellion. Blood-oath Irish Republican fanatics vow to kill the Queen and her family; Fenian assassins prepare bombs of terrible potency using the new explosive, dynamite.

The Queen’s spymasters in the newly created Special (Irish) Branch of Scotland Yard inform the Prime Minister that the odds of Her Majesty arriving safely at the Abbey are small, the odds that she might survive the Service, smaller.

In this second book in the Sherlock Holmes and Young Winston series, Holmes and his companions Doctor Watson and Winston Churchill are called in, not only to prevent a dynamite outrage against the Queen, but to avert a catastrophic war that might bring down the Empire.

But is all as it seems, or is one of Holmes’ clients using him in a plot to disgrace the other?