A fiendish seasonal mystery in which Holmes and Watson must discover the connections between a series of Christmas-themed murders in London. For fans of Gareth Rubin’s Holmes and Moriarty.

In the week before Christmas, Dr Watson convinces an unwilling Sherlock Holmes to accompany him into the centre of London to go shopping for a gift for Mrs Hudson. Unwilling to trail around lots of smaller establishments among the seasonal crowds, Holmes insists they leave early and go to only a single shop – Whitley’s, the capital’s first ‘department’ store, in which everything and anything can be found – ‘from a pin to an elephant’, in the words of its founder, William Whitley.

What they did not expect to find, however, is the body suspended in the branches of the large decorated Christmas tree just inside the entrance way. It looks as though the dead man has fallen from the high workman’s gantry standing to one side and broken his neck. Only Holmes hears a steady, slow drip and notices the pool of blood in the shadows beneath the tree, and recognises that a murder has taken place.

They are still at the store watching an ambulance take the body away when a runner appears from Scotland Yard with the news that another body has been discovered, again left in public. This time it is a young man, throttled with a thin rope, dangling from a beam in the changing rooms at Regents Park Boating Lake. Holmes is able to identify the dead man as a postman, and a search of the area round the lake uncovers his post bag in reeds by the water.

Led to Hampstead by an address on the now fashionable Christmas cards in the post bag, Watson peers through a window and sees someone with their back to him, sitting at a table, with a hand resting on a cup of tea. He knocks furiously, but the seated figure gives no sign of hearing him. They go round the back and find the back door unlocked. Cautiously they enter – to discover the sitter is an elderly woman, obviously dead, with her throat cut. On closer examination, they discover a bloody knife near her right hand, and that her mouth is stuffed to overflowing with Christmas cake.

Can Holmes and Watson find the pattern between these Christmas-themed murders, and bring an end to the killings before the festive season truly begins?