Description

When Sherlock Holmes receives a telegram from the widow of Colonel Sir Edmund Voss — found dead in his bolted study, clutching a length of azure silk — he quickly learns that this is no ordinary locked-room mystery. Three British officers from the 1857 Cawnpore campaign have now died under identical circumstances, each one a participant in the brutal reprisals that followed the Mutiny. The Foreign Office wishes the matter suppressed. Holmes wishes the truth.

The investigation draws Holmes and Dr Watson from the fog of Baker Street to the Surrey countryside, into the opium dens of Limehouse, the docks of Wapping, and the back corridors of government power. At the centre of it all is Kamala Singh — a survivor of the Cawnpore massacre who has spent thirty years building the Azure Lotus Society, a clandestine organisation dedicated to exacting justice from the men responsible for the slaughter of her people. She is brilliant, patient, and utterly without remorse. She is also the most formidable adversary Holmes has ever encountered.

As the body count rises and the conspiracy reaches into the highest levels of Victorian society, Holmes must navigate a case with no comfortable resolution: the killers are guilty of murder, but the murdered were guilty of something far older and far worse. When Kamala Singh finally invites Holmes to a midnight meeting at a Wapping warehouse, what she offers him is not a confession — it is a reckoning.

The Azure Lotus Affair is a prequel to the Dr John Watson's Recovered Memoirs series, written in the authentic voice of the original chronicles and set against the little-examined moral history of British India. Illustrated in the tradition of Sidney Paget.