Now in his third year of retirement, the celebrated master detective Sherlock Holmes announces his firm resolve to stay well out of the affairs of others to his old friend and colleague, Dr John Watson. But this emphatic sentiment is to be short lived. At the behest of his enigmatic brother, Mycroft, Holmes is persuaded to investigate two unexplained, catastrophic train derailments which have caused the death of more than forty people. Why would a criminal wreck an express train? As the clues accumulate - a strange astronomer, the German Intelligence Service, a Russian yacht in the port of Aberdeen - the most homicidal lunatic in Britain remains at large. Can even the strenuous efforts of Sherlock Holmes avert an international calamity and bring to justice this evil assassin? All is revealed in a tale that even the late Conan Doyle would have been proud of.