Lu Ci, an agent with China's Ministry of State Security, was killed on a counterterrorism mission. When he woke, he found himself in London in 1881, inhabiting the body of Lu Cheng, a young Chinese man who had just lost his father and was frail and sickly. He was the son of a translator at the Qing embassy in Britain.
Outside his window lay Victorian London, shrouded in fog. Sherlock Holmes lived across the street.
With all the professional knowledge he had acquired through 21st-century state security training, Lu Ci had to start over in this frail body. After he used modern forensic science to solve his first murder at a dock in the East End, Holmes knocked on his door. From mutual suspicion to fighting side by side, the two detectives, with their very different ways of thinking, developed an unusual rapport beneath London's gaslights.
But in this age of rampant crime, a mathematics professor named Moriarty was weaving a web of evil across London. Lu Cheng used modern network analysis to unravel this “criminal empire,” only to discover that he had become prey in the spider's sights.
From the East End slums to high-society salons, from secret archives at the British Museum to a life-and-death showdown at Reichenbach Falls, this is a story about identity and belonging, justice and choice.
The light at 221C Baker Street will always shine for those returning home late at night.
