[3] Architect Sir Alistair Sinclair and his foreman, Dennis McKay, have been slain in the midst of rehabilitating the medieval west tower of the Royal Palace of Holyrood—the very wing where Mary, Queen of Scots, had lived, and where David Rizzio had met his brutal, politically motivated end.

Mycroft Holmes fears these murders portend new threats against Britain's present monarch—the elderly Queen Victoria, who occasionally lodges at the palace—by a known assassin, perhaps in nefarious league with the German Kaiser.

En route north, Holmes and Watson are menaced aboard their train by a red-bearded bomb thrower (supposedly a rabid Scots nationalist), only to discover that still greater dangers await them, and others, at Holyroodhouse.

The plaintive drone of a weeping woman, cruelly punctured and shattered corpses, a pool of blood "that never dries", and a disembodied Italian voice with unexpected musical tastes all imply the wrath of wraiths behind recent atrocities.

"[3] Kirkus Reviews also criticized the book saying "It’s fun for about a hundred pages, because Carr apes Conan Doyle’s plummy storyteller’s voice quite ably...But the successive disclosures become increasingly preposterous.