Elle Dibden

To Holmes, though, Madame Cabrini is more personally known as the woman with an uncanny ability to spot him in disguise, her penchant for the lore of the Wild West, and her inability to take “no” for an answer (except from one, particular power). Rerouted from her lifelong dreams to work in China, and medically waylaid in London on her way to America, her fledgling school for young girls at Brockley is threatened by lacking funds, anti-Catholic and immigrant sentiment, and now a series of unexpected and suspicious deaths. At this time, Anglican England braces to accommodate the massive waves of Eastern European Jewish and Italian immigrants settling in London, as many find themselves too impoverished to move on to America. With their numbers come a breadth of cultures, various religions with competing leaders, and a wave of crime syndicates flooding the London streets.

Sherlock Holmes is called to the Vatican by Pope Leo XIII to prospectively solve his third Vatican case. Holmes returns to London only to be summoned twice more the same evening, firstly by the eccentric Detective Inspector Emerson Pearle, questionably appointed to the H Squad of the problematic Jewish ghetto in the East End by the ever politically volatile Scotland Yard, then secondly by Mother Frances Cabrini herself. Holmes reconnects with Dr. Watson, who is deeply entangled in the chains of Victorian grief by the death of his second wife. Meanwhile, Wiggins, Billy, and the irregulars continue their struggle for survival on the streets, their stories intersecting with a rogue prefect from Mother Cabrini‘s school who gallivants about the London streets disguised in a nun’s habit. Holmes must tease the knots of the seemingly disparate threads of connection between the web of London crime, the precarious politics of Mother Cabrini‘s school, his own brother’s government associations, and the appearance of blue violets at the crime scenes, save a school for girls and young women, and somehow instill hope in Watson to continue living.