Caleb Carr's newest tale (commissioned by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) begins when Sherlock Holmes reveals to Dr. Watson an encrypted telegram he has received from his brother Mycroft; the famous detective has been summoned to the aid of Queen Victoria in Scotland. Rushed northward on a royal train - and nearly murdered themselves en route - Holmes and Watson are soon joined by Mycroft, and learn of the brutal killings of a renowned architect and his foreman, both of whom had been preparing to renovate a wing of the famous and forbidding Royal Palace of Holyrood, in Edinburgh.<BR>Mycroft has enlisted his brother to help solve the murders that may be key elements of a much more elaborate and pernicious plot on the Queen's life. But the circumstances of the two victims' deaths also call to Holmes's mind the terrible murder - in the palace of Holyrood - of "The Italian Secretary," David Rizzio. The only difficulty? Rizzio, a music teacher and confidante of Mary, Queen of Scots, was butchered before Mary's very eyes three centuries earlier by supporters of England's Queen Elizabeth (and perhaps with the approval of that uncompromising ruler herself) in an attempt to break the spirit of the very independent young Scottish Queen.<BR>Holmes proceeds to alarm Watson with the suggestion that the Italian Secretary's vengeful spirit may have taken the lives of the two men as punishment for disturbing the scene of his assassination. Will these two new deaths turn out to be mere coincidence? Have old political rivalries reared their poisonous heads once again? Or has the Italian Secretary indeed exacted his own terrible revenge?