“From now on, I am going to be Sherlock Holmes, the World’s Greatest Cat Detective.” With those words, my friend Spot decided he would become a crime-solving kitty. “And you, of course,” he said dramatically, “will be my faithful friend, Dr. John Watson. The one who writes down all of my adventures and shares them with the world! We’ll be famous! Everyone will know the name ‘Sherlock Holmes, the World’s Greatest Cat Detective’!” I wasn’t too worried. I was sure that, by morning, Spot would have forgotten all about becoming Sherlock Holmes. Boy, was I wrong.

What is a crimson trail? Is it blood? Or paint? Or yarn? Why would Sherlock Holmes revisit a previously solved case? How could an open window be important and how can a house be blackmailed? Dr. John Watson reveals the answers to these questions in The Crimson Trail and Other Stories along with cases involving the disappearance of a poet's intended, a Christmas card clue, a missing tiara, a caped murderer, a vampire attack, and a mythical moor creature.

On the eve of Newgate Prison's demolition, Watson spies Holmes leaving a public sale of the prison's miscellany in the company of a beautiful stranger, and in possession of an unusual trophy–the death mask of a woman who, more than 20 years earlier, had been executed for the murder of her three children. Holmes agrees to satisfy Watson's curiosity about the memento by recounting the decades-old history of its subject.

A gruesome display of corpses on the frozen Thames spells doom for Mycroft Holmes. Scotland Yard singles him out as the main suspect of a series of violent crimes because they're all connected by a single thread: Mycroft's name. As public attention rises, he fights to avert any danger to his family and the Secret Service. To capture the culprit, Mycroft has to face an exceedingly uncomfortable truth about himself, which puts not only his career but his very life into question.

Holmes and Watson are on the trail of seemingly unrelated deaths preceded by sudden unexplained madness as they work to solve the case of the abominable worm. Are the deaths murders? And if so, what is the motive and who is responsible? Can Holmes and Watson solve the mystery of the abominable worm before her Majesty's navy experiences an unprecedented two-fold loss. Rebecca St. John has established herself as a force to be reckoned with in London's mysterious spiritual world and the hidden world of London's private clubs. But she wants more.