Enoch Hale with Sherlock Holmes

London, 1920: Boston-bred Enoch Hale, working as a reporter for the Central News Syndicate, arrives on the scene shortly after a music-hall escape artist is found hanging from the ceiling in his dressing room. What at first appears to be a suicide turns out to be murder...the first of several using the same modus operandi. What's the connecting factor among all the victims? Or isn't there one? That's what the dogged journalist Hale aims to find out.

London, 1922: Two years after helping Sherlock Holmes solve the Hangman Murders, American journalist Enoch Hale becomes even more intimately involved in another puzzling mystery. Langdale Pike, veteran purveyor of gossip to the trash newspapers, is poisoned while sipping tea with Hale - and apparently just as he is about to spill a secret more important than social gossip. With the unrequested aid of advertising copywriter Dorothy Sayers, Hale pursues a number of leads based on notes in Pike's pocket diary - including an interview with the formidable G.K. Chesterton.

London, 1924: When Alfie Barrington is stabbed to death outside his club, suspicion quickly falls on his widow, the lovely Sarah - and on her former beau, Enoch Hale. The American journalist has an alibi, but he doesn't know her name and Scotland Yard can't find her. Determined to solve this case without the help of his friend Sherlock Holmes, Hale launches and investigation that brings him into contact with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, bohemian writers and publishers; P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster; Howard Carter, discoverer of King Tuts tomb.