Harvey Mapes is a 26-year-old security guard who spends his nights in a guard shack outside a gated community in Southern California, reading detective novels, watching reruns, and waiting for his life to finally start… which happens when Cyril Parkus, one of the wealthy residents, asks Harvey to follow his beautiful wife Lauren.

The lowly security guard jumps at the opportunity to fulfill his private eye fantasies and use everything he’s learned from Spenser, Magnum, and Mannix. But things don’t exactly go according to the books…or the reruns. As Harvey fumbles and stumbles through his first investigation, he discovers that the differences between fiction and reality can be deadly.

With the help of his mortgage broker neighbor and occasional lover Carol, Harvey uncovers a blackmail plot that takes a sudden and unexpectedly tragic turn…plunging him into a world of violence, deception and murder… and forcing him to discover what it really takes to be a private eye.

The year is 1912. Sherlock Holmes is called out of retirement by brother Mycroft, acting on behalf of the British Government, to investigate a break-in at the Norfolk home of a wealthy German financier, Sir Edward Muster.

Holmes is soon at work dismantling a German spy ring, but the investigation is quickly clouded by his suspicions concerning Mycroft’s pivotal role in those events. What agenda is Mycroft pursuing? What is the truth behind the loss of the fishing vessels the Misty Jane and the Yarmouth Adventuress in the North Sea? And why is the Royal Navy seemingly operating incognito along the Norfolk coast?

Before long a number of very different events come together to reveal a dangerous conspiracy. As the story unfolds against the background of an International Opium Conference, Holmes and Watson find themselves embroiled in espionage and arms smuggling in the tense period leading up to the First World War.