What happens when the dead refuse to stay buried?

London, 1890. A man is pulled from the Thames, identified by three witnesses, and buried in a pauper’s grave in Southwark. The paperwork is signed. The mourning has begun. The case is closed.

Two days later, he is seen alive at a window in Kensington—bruised, emaciated, and terrified.

When the police prove more embarrassed than effective, schoolmistress Ruth Kellett brings her impossible story to 221B Baker Street. What Sherlock Holmes uncovers is not a ghost story, but something far more disturbing: a criminal enterprise built upon the institutions society trusts most—the parish surgeons, the burial registers, the funeral parlours that move through the city with blinds no one dares to lift.

At the heart of it all sits Oswald Peever, an undertaker of impeccable reputation, who has spent three years selling the most audacious service imaginable: death on demand. For the right price, a living man can vanish from the world’s records, replaced by a stranger’s corpse dressed in his clothes. But when an honest clerk stumbles upon the scheme and becomes its first unwilling victim, Peever’s empire of forged mortality begins to crack.

In this meticulously crafted Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Holmes and Watson must navigate a web of falsified deaths, corrupted officials, and grief weaponised as camouflage—before a man who has already been buried once disappears for good.

For fans of Arthur Conan Doyle, Caleb Carr, and Anthony Horowitz’s Moriarty.